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POETRY 6? LIFE 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 



POETRY & LIFE SERIES 

General Editor : 
WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON 

Staff-Lecturer in Literature to the 
University Extension Board of the 
University of London 
KEATS AND HIS POETRY By W. H. Hudson 

JOHNSON AND GOLDSMITH AND THEIR POETRY 
By Thomas Seccombe 
GRAY AND HIS POETRY By W. H. Hudson 

SHELLEY AND HIS POETRY By E. W. Edmunds, M.A. 
COLERIDGE AND HIS POETRY 

By Kathleen E. Royds 
MATTHEW ARNOLD AND HIS POETRY 

By Francis Bickley 
LOWELL AND HIS POETRY By W. H. Hudson 

BURNS AND HIS POETRY By H. A. Kellow, M.A. 
SPENSER AND HIS POETRY By S. E. Winbolt, M.A. 
MRS. BROWNING AND HER POETRY 

By Kathleen E. Royds 
MILTON AND HIS POETRY By W. H. Hudson 

SCOTT AND HIS POETRY By A. E. Morgan, B.A. 
ELIZABETHAN LYRISTS AND THEIR POETRY 

By Amy Cruse 
TENNYSON AND HIS POETRY 

By R. Brimley Johnson, B.A. 
BYRON AND HIS POETRY By William Dick, M.A. 
LONGFELLOW AND HIS POETRY 

By Oliphant Smeaton, M.A., F.S.A. 
POE AND HIS POETRY By Lewis N. Chase 

HORACE AND HIS POETRY By J. B. Chapman, M.A. 
POPE AND HIS POETRY By E. W. Edmunds, M.A. 
BROWNING AND HIS POETRY By Ernest Rhys 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS POETRY 

By W. H. Hudson 

SCHILLER AND HIS POETRY By W. H. Hudson 

ROSSETTI AND HIS POETRY By Mrs. Boas 

COWPER AND HIS POETRY By James A. Roy 

. MARLOWE AND HIS POETRY 

By John H. Ingram 
i CHAUCER AND HIS POETRY 

By E. W. Edmunds, M.A. 

Other Volumes in active preparation 



/2^ 



ROSSETTI 

& HIS POETRY 



BY 
MRS. F. S. BOAS 

Author of "With Milton and 
the Cavaliers ' etc. 




LONDON: GEORGE G. 
HARRAP & COMPANY 

2 &3 PORTSMOUTH STREET 
KINGSWAY W.C. 4 MCMXIV 



.,pv< 



5*** 



rpt 






PRINTED AT 

THE BALLANTYNE PRESS 

LONDON ENGLAND 



GENERAL PREFACE 

A GLANCE through the pages of this little 
book will suffice to disclose the general 
plan of the series of which it forms a 
part. Only a few words of explanation, there- 
fore, will be necessary. 

The point of departure is the undeniable fact 
that with the vast majority of young students 
of literature a living interest in the work of any 
poet can best be aroused, and an intelligent 
appreciation of it secured, when it is immediately 
associated with the character and career of the 
poet himself. The cases are indeed few and far 
between in which much fresh light will not be 
thrown upon a poem by some knowledge of the 
personality of the writer, while it will often be 
found that the most direct — perhaps even the 
only — way to the heart of its meaning lies 
through a consideration of the circumstances 
in which it had its birth. ) The purely aesthetic 
critic may possibly object that a poem should 
be regarded simply as a self-contained and 
detached piece of art, having no personal 
affiliations or bearings. Of the validity of this 
as an abstract principle nothing need now be 
said. ( The fact remains that, in the earlier 
stages of study at any rate, poetry is most valued 
and loved when it is made to seem most human 
and vital ; and the human and vital interest 
of poetry can be most surely brought home 
to the reader by the biographical method of 
interpretation. ) 

5 



GENERAL PREFACE 

This is to some extent recognized by writers 
of histories and text-books of literature, and by 
editors of selections from the works of our 
poets ; for place is always given by them to a 
certain amount of biographical material. But 
in the histories and text-books the biography of 
a given writer stands by itself, and his work 
has to be sought elsewhere, the student being 
left to make the connexion for himself ; while 
even in our current editions of selections there 
is little systematic attempt to link biography, 
step by step, with production. 

This brings us at once to the chief purpose 
of the present series. In this, biography and 
production will be considered together and in 
intimate association. In other words, an en- 
deavour will be made to interest the reader in 
the lives and personalities of the poets dealt 
with, and at the same time to use biography 
as an introduction and key to their writings. 

Each volume will therefore contain the life- 
story of the poet who forms its subject. In this, 
attention will be specially directed to his per- 
sonality as it expressed itself in his poetry, and 
to the influences and conditions which counted 
most as formative factors in the growth of his 
genius. This biographical study will be used 
as a setting for a selection, as large as space 
will permit, of his representative poems. Such 
poems, where possible, will be reproduced in full, 
and care will be taken to bring out their con- 
nexion with his character, his circumstances, 
and the movement of his mind. Then, in 
6 



GENERAL PREFACE 

addition, so much more general literary criti- 
cism will be incorporated as may seem to be 
needed to supplement the biographical material, 
and to exhibit both the essential qualities and 
the historical importance of his work. 

It is believed that the plan thus pursued is 
substantially in the nature of a new departure, 
and that the volumes of this series, constituting 
as they will an introduction to the study of 
some of our greatest poets, will be found useful 
to teachers and students of literature, and no 
less to the general lover of English poetry. 

WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON 



PREFATORY NOTE 

I HAVE to thank Mr. W. M. Rossetti and 
Messrs. Ellis and Elvey for their kind 
permission to quote freely from the histori- 
cal ballads " The White Ship" and " The 
King's Tragedy." 

H. O'B. B. 



POEMS QUOTED 
IN WHOLE 




St. Luke the Painter 
My Sister's Sleep 
The Blessed Damozel 


16 
24 
30 



The Carillon (afterwards renamed Ant- 
werp and Bruges) 41 
From the Cliffs (afterwards renamed 

The Sea- Limits) v ' 43 
Pax Vobis (afterwards renamed World's 

Worth) 44 
A Dance of Nymphs, by Andrea Man- 
tegna ; in the Louvre (afterwards re- 
named For an Allegorical Dance of 

Women, by Andrea Mantegna) 46 

Between Ghent and Bruges 48 

The Portrait *-""" 96 
Lilith (afterwards renamed Body's 

Beauty) 104 

First Love Remembered 117 

Lovesight 120 

Love-Sweetness 120 

The Monochord 121 

Lost Days 122 

Lost on Both Sides 123 

A Superscription 123 



POEMS QUOTED 

PAGE 

Venus (afterwards renamed Venus 

Verticordia) 137 

On Refusal of Aid between Nations 138 



POEMS QUOTED 
IN PART 

Ave 51 

The Burden of Nineveh 56, 57, 58, 59 

The Staff and Scrip 61, 62, 63, 64, 65 

A Last Confession 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81 

Sister Helen 84, 86, 88, 89, 90 

Eden Bower 105, 106, 107, 109, no 

Love's Nocturne 117, 118 

The One Hope 124 

Troy Town 135, 136 

The King's Tragedy 140, 141, 142, 143 

The White Ship 144, 145 

Rose Mary 146 



ROSSETTI & 
HIS POETRY 

GABRIEL CHARLES DANTE ROSSETTI 
was born in Charlotte Street, Portland 
Place, London, on May 12, 1828. From 
about the year 1850 he used only two of his 
Christian names, and reversed their order : thus 
the world has always known him as Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti. 

London happened to be his birthplace, and 
his life was spent in England, but he was not 
an Englishman except by birth ; this is impor- 
tant to remember when he is criticized adversely 
for not possessing certain essentially British 
characteristics which by birth he did not inherit. 
His mother's mother was English, but his other 
three grandparents were Italian. 

His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a politician 
and patriot of no mean order in the kingdom of 
Naples. He took an active part in the rising 
of 1820 ; and, owing to its failure, he had to 
leave the country, and fled to England, the home 
of the homeless. 

Gabriele Rossetti 's own literary gifts were 
considerable : he was an enthusiastic student 
of Dante — hence his son's name — and published 
critical works on that poet, and also other 
compositions, both in prose and verse. In 1826 
he married Frances Polidori, the daughter of 
an Italian of literary and poetic reputation, and 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

there were four children of the marriage. 
Polidori's wife had been English, her maiden 
name was Pierce ; and from her came the 
only British blood that ran in Rossetti 's veins. 

Of the four children of Gabriele Rossetti and 
Frances Polidori the eldest was a daughter, 
Maria Francesca, who died in 1876 ; the second 
was Dante Gabriel ; the third the well-known 
art critic, William Michael, who was his 
brother's junior only by a year ; and the 
youngest Christina Georgina, the gifted poetess, 
who died in 1894. 

In 1 83 1 Gabriele Rossetti had been appointed 
Professor of Italian Literature at King's College, 
and he held the post till the year 1845, when 
his sight began to fail and he was obliged to 
resign it. Owing to their father's position and 
interests the children grew up in congenial 
surroundings, and in a fine intellectual atmo- 
sphere. What early records remain of the 
childhood of the great poet-painter point to 
busy happy days, and to the warmest family 
affection. 

After a short time at a preparatory school, 
Rossetti entered King's College School in 1837 
and remained there for six years, until he was 
fifteen : to the Latin and Greek and French 
which he there acquired he added Italian and 
German learned at home. 

There was evidently a habit of affectionate 
companionship among the different members 
of the family, and it is pleasant to remember 
that, in spite of the various changes and 
12 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

sorrows inevitable to such a nature as his, 
family affection never failed Rossetti through- 
out his life. His father died in 1854, but in 
intercourse and in correspondence he and his 
mother were united to the end ; both she and 
his sister Christina were with him in the last 
sad days at Birchington, and shared the watch 
of his faithful lifelong friend and companion, 
his only brother William Michael, to whose 
literary work on his behalf we owe so much. 

In letters of his own, and in touches here 
and there by his brother and other friends, we 
can catch a glimpse of the cheerful, intellectual, 
and affectionate atmosphere in which Rossetti's 
boyhood was passed. 

Two letters to his aunts, Margaret and Eliza 
Polidori, give charming hints of that early home- 
life. The first was written before he was seven, 
and the family standard — or that of the day — 
must have been high in the matter of letter- 
writing, for his brother speaks of him as 
" backward — or one might say lazy — at letter- 
writing.' ' 

" 38 Charlotte Street, London. 

" 7 April, 1835. 

" Dear Aunt M., — Papa has bought two shawls 
for Maria and Christina. Dr. Curci, a great 
friend of papa's, came from Naples, and has 
given Christina a little locket without hair, 
of the Virgin Mary with Jesus Christ in her 
arms ; it has a rim of mother-of-pearl. Papa 
introduced Dr. Curci to a party where there 

13 



ROSSETTI ©HIS POETRY 

was the Turkish Ambassador, who asked papa 
to improvise. 

" I remain, 

" Your affectionate nephew, 

"GABRIEL ROSSETTI." 



" 38 Charlotte Street, London. 

"9 July, 1835. 

" Dear Aunt Eliza, — We went to a fancy fair 
in the Regent's Park, where I bought a box of 
paints, Maria an album, and Christina two 
fishes and a hook. The fair was for the benefit 
of a charity school. I have been reading 
Shakespeare's ' Richard the Third ' for my 
amusement, and like it exceedingly. I, Maria, 
and William know several scenes by heart. I 
have bought a picture of Richard and Richmond 
fighting, and I gilded it, after which I cut it 
out with no white. My aunt came yesterday, 
and gave Maria a pretty little basket ; it was 
worked in flowers of green card. 
" I remain, my dear aunt, 

" Your affectionate nephew, 

"GABRIEL C. D. ROSSETTI." 

The poet-painter is seen here, even at seven 
years old ! The box of paints, and the gilded 
picture cut out " with no white," and the 
enjoyment in learning by heart parts of "Richard 
the Third," read, as he proudly puts it, "for 
my amusement." There is a letter written 
about the year 1843, to his grandfather Polidori, 
14 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

which shows singular literary acumen on the 
part of a boy of fifteen ; in it he identifies an 
Italian poem of his grandfather's as a transla- 
tion of a poem by Sir Henry Wotton in Percy's 
1 ' Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. ' ' There 
had evidently been some mistake in printing 
the lines as original ; but the incident throws 
a pleasant light as to the terms the boy was on 
with his grandfather, and one cannot but wish 
that Polidori's reply to his young critic were 
forthcoming. 

Rossetti is described by those who knew him 
as a boy of strong affections and emotions ; in 
appearance graceful and slender, with the large 
round head, massive forehead, curling hair, 
and brilliant eyes with which his many portraits 
have made us familiar : the lower part of his 
face was its weakest, as is not infrequently the 
case with great men, and the moustache and 
beard he grew in later life improved his appear- 
ance by hiding his mouth. 

He was not a boy to shine in the severely 
bracing atmosphere of an English public school ; 
but, according to his own words in later life, he 
endured it though he never liked it, chiefly for 
the sake of his mother and his desire to please her. 

The slight difficulty there is in dealing with 
him here, where his poetry only is followed, is 
that painting, not literature, was from the first 
his profession : but with him the two arts were 
inextricably mingled ; his ideas, his aims, his 
very subjects were constantly the same. 

When he left King's College School he studied 

IS 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

first at an art academy in Bloomsbury, and 
afterwards at the Antique School of the Royal 
Academy. There he first came under the 
influence of Mr. Holman Hunt, with whom, in 
the autumn of 1847, ne joined in renting a 
studio at 7 Cleveland Street, Fitzroy Square. 
Previous to this he had worked in the studio of 
Mr. Ford Madox Brown, and under his kindly 
guidance. It was in the studio at Cleveland 
Street that Rossetti began to paint " The Girl- 
hood of Mary Virgin," which was the first of 
his works to embody the principles of the Pre- 
Raphaelite Brotherhood. At this time he con- 
templated painting a picture founded on old 
traditions representing St. Luke preaching with 
pictures beside him of Christ and the Virgin, 
drawn by his own hand. The picture was never 
executed ; but the three sonnets, " Old and 
New Art," now 74, 75, and 76 in " The House 
of Life," were inspired by the theme ; and the 
first of them illustrates with special vividness 
Rossetti 's conception that Art should again 
become the handmaid of the religious spirit. 

ST. LUKE THE PAINTER 

Give honour unto Luke Evangelist ; 

For he it was (the aged legends say) 
Who first taught Art to fold her hands and pray. 
Scarcely at once she dared to rend the mist 
Of devious symbols : but soon having wist 
How sky-breadth and field-silence and this day 
Are symbols also in some deeper way, 
She looked through these to God and was God's priest. 
16 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

And if, past noon, her toil began to irk, 

And she sought talismans, and turned in vain 
To soulless self -reflections of man's skill, — 
Yet now, in this the twilight, she might still 
Kneel in the latter grass to pray again, 
Ere the night cometh and she may not work. 



II 

IN the autumn of 1848, Rossetti and Holman 
Hunt saw in Millais' rooms in Gower 
Street a book of engravings from frescoes 
in the Campo Santo of Pisa, which seemed to 
embody the ideals of art toward which the 
minds of the three friends had been indepen- 
dently struggling. It was from that day that 
they determined to found what may be called a 
League of Sincerity, with loftier aims than those 
usually valued by artists, and with the leading 
principle that each confessor should paint his 
best with due reference to nature, without which 
there could be no sincerity. They had no 
intention of following, much less copying, the 
modes and moods of the artists who preceded 
Raphael, nor of rejecting anything which had 
been attained in the service of art since the 
great painter's days. 

To the enthusiasm of Rossetti was chiefly 
due the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood, which, though it did not live long 
in its original form, was destined to effect and 
develop an important revolution in English art. 

The first ' ' Brothers ' ' were Rossetti himself, 
b 17 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Holman Hunt, Millais, and Thomas Woolner ; 
and they added to their number W. M. 
Rossetti, Frederic George Stephens, and James 
Collinson ; the last remained with them but 
a short time, and was replaced by Walter 
Howell Deverell. W. M. Rossetti gives as the 
aim of the Brotherhood, " to show forth what 
was in them in the way of solid and fresh thought 
or invention, personal observation, and the 
intimate study of and strict adherence to 
nature." They entertained, he says, " a 
hearty contempt for much of the art — flimsy, 
frivolous, and conventional — which they saw 
in practice around them. ' ' Sincerity and fidelity 
to fact were to take the place, with them, of 
convention ; and, moreover, the temper of 
prosaic acceptance and domestic materialism 
was to be replaced by " the temper of wonder, 
reverence, and awe." Art was to re-enter the 
domain of the mystic and the supernatural. 

Rossetti's own most memorable achievement 
in painting on Pre-Raphaelite principles was 
the supremely beautiful panel-picture of the 
Annunciation, " Ecce Ancilla Domini," begun 
in 1849 and finished in March 1850. The face 
of the Virgin was a faithful likeness of his sister 
Christina. 

But while this picture was being painted the 
movement was entering on its literary phase, 
which was carried on, for a time, in twofold 
form, by a journal and a magazine. 

The journal was to be a chronicle of the doings 
of each member of the Brotherhood : W. M. 
18 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Rossetti was chosen as secretary, and kept the 
diary from May 1849 till January 1853. Its 
pages would be of even greater interest than 
they are had they not been partly destroyed by 
the impatient hand of D. G. Rossetti, who 
objected apparently to some of the entries 
concerned with his own work, and so tore them 
out and rendered the journal imperfect. 

The idea of a magazine which should embody 
the new views and send them forth to the world 
was due to Rossetti, who propounded the 
scheme to his fellow workers in September 
1849. The idea soon found favour, but some 
delay ensued over a title, and a list has been 
preserved of sixty- one suggested ! They varied 
in idea from "The Advent" and "Earnest 
Thoughts," "The Student," " The Chalice," 
and " The Sphere," to " The Ant "and " The 
Atom," " The Truth-seeker," " The Mediator," 
and "The Dawn." "Bud," "Acorn," 
" Seed," and " Sower " had also been among 
the proposed titles, and one akin to these was 
finally chosen, "The Germ," suggested by 
Mr. W. C. Thomas, the painter. W. M. Rossetti 
was to be the first editor ; he was not a painter, 
as were most of the other members, and so had 
rather more time at his disposal. The first 
number of " The Germ " appeared on January 
1, 1850, and its list of contributors is such as 
to render somewhat ironical the fact that its 
course was run with difficulty from the begin- 
ning and came to an end with the fourth 
issue. 

19 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

This is the table of contents of the first 
number : 



I. 


My Beautiful Lady 


Thomas Woolner. 


II. 


Of my Lady in Death 


Thomas Woolner. 


III. 


The Love of Beauty 


Ford Madox Brown. 


IV. 


The Subject in Art. 






No. i 


[J. L. Tupper.] 


V. 


The Seasons 


[Coventry Patmore.] 


VI. 


Dream-land 


Ellen Alleyn. 


VII. 


Songs of One House- 
hold, No. i. (My 






Sister's Sleep) 


Dante Gabriel Rossetti 


VIII. 


Hand and Soul 


Dante Gabriel Rossetti 


IX. 


" The Bothie of Toper- 






na-fuosich." 


Wm. M. Rossetti. 


X. 


Her First Season 


Wm. M. Rossetti. 


XI. 


A Sketch from Nature 


[J. L. Tupper.] 


XII. 


An End 

Sonnet (see wrapper) 


Ellen Alleyn. 



Nos. IV, VIII, and IX were in prose ; the rest 
in verse : " Ellen Alleyn " was the pseudonym 
which her brothers chose for Christina Rossetti. 

The brief course of " The Germ " is one of the 
strongest instances ever recorded of genius 
unrecognized by her own time. The very 
names of its contributors have become house- 
hold words : they gave their best in an attempt 
" to claim for poetry that place to which its 
present development in the literature of the 
country so emphatically entitles it " ; and, in 
art, to " encourage and enforce an entire 
adherence to the simplicity of nature " ; and 
yet the "forlorn little periodical" — as Mr. 

20 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Edmund Gosse has called it — ran a precarious 
existence for four numbers, and then died for 
want of funds and lack of public support. None 
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers were rich ; 
after an entry in their journal, speaking of the 
financial loss on the first number of ' ' The 
Germ," the editor writes : " It seems that the 
expense to each of us beyond the receipts will 
be £i 15s. 5d. This is a kind of experiment 
that won't bear repetition more than once or 
twice." And yet when these early prophets 
had been well stoned by their contemporaries, 
a new generation industriously built their 
sepulchres ! In 1896 three copies of " The 
Germ " were sold in London at an average of 
£y apiece ; in 1897 the same number averaged 
£10 each ; and in 1898 the price of a set of 
choicely bound copies rose to £37 10s. 

Rossetti's contributions to the first issue of 
" The Germ" consisted in the prose story 
" Hand and Soul " and his beautiful poem 
" My Sister's Sleep." The interest of the first 
is enhanced by the fact that it is largely auto- 
biographical, also that it expresses throughout 
the views and aims of the Brotherhood of which 
its author was the leading spirit. 

The incidents and characters in the story are 
imaginary, but Rossetti puts much of his own 
nature into that of the hero, Chiaro dell' Erma, 
a young Italian painter, who speaks often from 
the very soul of his creator, in the way common 
to so many of Browning's characters. 

It is himself he seems to describe as he dwells 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

on the growing intensity of Chiaro's nature : 
" The extreme longing after a visible embodi- 
ment of his thoughts strengthened as his years 
increased, more even than his sinews or the 
blood of his life, until he would feel faint in 
sunsets and at the sight of stately persons." 
The painter of Arezzo is Rossetti himself, even 
in his habits : " Sometimes, after nightfall, 
he would walk abroad in the most solitary 
places he could find, hardly feeling the ground 
under him because of the thoughts of the day 
which held him in fever." They are the same 
in feeling : " With all that Chiaro had done 
during these three years, and even before, with 
the studies of his early youth, there had always 
been a feeling of worship and service. It was 
the peace-offering that he made to God and to 
his own soul for the eager selfishness of his 
aim. There was earth, indeed, upon the hem 
of his raiment ; but this was of the heaven, 
-heavenly." Chiaro's words, when the iron of 
despondency had entered into his soul, might 
be a prophecy of Rossetti's own future : " Fame 
failed me : faith failed me : and now this also — 
the hope that I nourished in this my generation 
of men — shall pass from me, and leave my feet 
and my hands groping. Yet, because of this, 

, are my feet become slow and my hands thin. 

1 I am as one who, through the whole night, 
holding his way diligently, hath smitten the 
steel into the flint, to lead some whom he knew 
darkling ; who hath kept his eyes always on 
the sparks that himself made, lest they should 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

fail ; and who, towards dawn, turning to bid 
them that he had guided God-speed, sees the 
wet grass untrodden except of his own feet." 
Surely the hopelessness of failure has hardly 
ever been drawn with a finer or more perfect 
touch than in these words : the delicate beauty 
of the passage is beyond all comment. The 
spirit of the Pre-Raphaelites breathes in every 
page of the story, until it finds its most perfect 
expression in Chiaro 's vision, which might have 
been Rossetti's own. " And when she that 
spoke had said these words within Chiaro's 
spirit, she left his side quietly, and stood up as 
he had first seen her ; with her fingers laid 
together, and her eyes steadfast, and with the 
breadth of her long dress covering her feet on 
the floor." The figure might be drawn from 
one of his own pictures, each touch describes 
his method so exactly. 

And once again she spoke to him, this time 
in the solemn accents of farewell. " Chiaro, 
servant of God, take now thine art unto thee, 
and paint me thus, as I am, to know me : weak, 
as I am, and in the weeds of this time ; only 
with eyes which seek out labour, and with a 
faith not learned, yet jealous of prayer. Do 
this ; so shall thy soul stand before thee always, 
and perplex thee no more." 

The words that had been spoken to Chiaro 
by " the fair woman, that was his soul," might 
well stand for Rossetti's dedication of his own 
life, spoken as they were upon its very threshold. 

His other contribution to the first number 

23 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

of " The Germ," the poem " My Sister's Sleep," 
was possibly the first work of his which was 
ever published. It had been written about the 
age of nineteen ; and his brother, when speak- 
ing of their visits to an old friend, Major Calder 
Campbell, a retired Indian officer of literary 
tastes, writes as follows : " I well remember 
that, at the instance of Calder Campbell, ' My 
Sister's Sleep ' was produced to the editress of 
' La Belle Assemblee,' a magazine of that date, 
1847 or 1848, which must have seen better days 
aforetime, but was then still tolerably well 
accepted in the regions of light literature. The 
editress certainly admired the poem, and 
perhaps she inserted it ; if so, this was the very 
first appearance of Dante Rossetti in published 
print." 

We give the poem in full in its final form as 
it appears in the Collected Works, and we also 
give, within brackets, four verses which are 
omitted there, but which appeared in the first 
copy of ' ' The Germ ' ' : 

MY SISTER'S SLEEP 

She fell asleep on Christmas Eve. 

At length the long-ungranted shade 

Of weary eyelids overweigh'd 
The pain naught else might yet relieve. 

Our mother, who had leaned all day 
Over the bed from chime to chime, 
Then raised herself for the first time, 

And as she sat her down, did pray. 
24 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Her little work-table was spread 
With work to finish. For the glare 
Made by her candle, she had care 

To work some distance from the bed. 



Without, there was a cold moon up, 
Of winter radiance sheer and thin ; 
The hollow halo it was in 

Was like an icy crystal cup. 

Through the small room, with subtle sound 
Of flame, by vents the fireshine drove 
And reddened. In its dim alcove 

The mirror shed a clearness round. 

I had been sitting up some nights, 

And my tired mind felt weak and blank ; 
Like a sharp strengthening wine it drank 

The stillness and the broken lights. 

[Silence was speaking at my side 

With an exceedingly clear voice : 

I knew the calm as in a choice 
Made in God for me, to abide. 

I said, " Full knowledge does not grieve : 
This which upon my spirit dwells 
Perhaps would have been sorrow else : 

But I am glad 'tis Christmas Eve."] 

Twelve struck. That sound, by dwindling years 
Heard in each hour, crept off ; and then 
The ruffled silence spread again, 

Like water that a pebble stirs. 

25 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Our mother rose from where she sat : 
Her needles, as she laid them down, 
Met lightly, and her silken gown 

Settled : no other noise than that. 

" Glory unto the Newly Born ! " 

So, as said angels, she did say ; 

Because we were in Christmas Day, 
Though it would still be long till morn. 

[She stood a moment with her hands 
Kept in each other, praying much ; 
A moment that the soul may touch 

But the heart only understands. 

Almost unwittingly, my mind 

Repeated her words after her ; 

Perhaps tho' my lips did not stir ; 
It was scarce thought, or cause assign'd.] 

Just then in the room over us 

There was a pushing back of chairs, 
As some who had sat unawares 

So late, now heard the hour, and rose. 

With anxious softly-stepping haste 
Our mother went where Margaret lay, 
Fearing the sounds o'erhead — should they 

Have broken her long watched-for rest ! 

She stopped an instant, calm, and turned ; 

But suddenly turned back again ; 

And all her features seemed in pain 
With woe, and her eyes gazed and yearned. 
26 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

For my part, I but hid my face, 

And held my breath, and spoke no word : 
There was none spoken ; but I heard 

The silence for a little space. 

Our mother bowed herself and wept : 
And both my arms fell, and I said, 
" God knows I knew that she was dead." 

And there, all white, my sister slept. 

Then kneeling, upon Christmas morn 
A little after twelve o'clock, 
We said, ere the first quarter struck, 

" Christ's blessing on the newly born ! " 



The metre of this poem is the same as that 
always associated with Tennyson's " In Memo- 
riam," though the rhythm is so different that 
they are not always recognized as identical : it 
is interesting to notice that W. M. Rossetti 
writes in the "Pre-Raphaelite Journal" for 
November 2, 1849 : "I saw Tennyson's MS. 
book of elegies on young Hallam, which are 
to be published some day." " In Memoriam " 
was published in the following year. 

Rossetti, like Tennyson, constantly altered 
his verse, and polished it with minute care. 
Sometimes he seems to sacrifice beauty of 
thought to that of form, as in the case here in 
verse 12, where the original version of the 
poem has " she stooped " and the later form 
changes it to " she stopped " ; and again, in 
verse 4, where the original ends in two lines 

27 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

which are surely more beautiful than those in 
the later edition : 

The depth of light that it was in 
Seemed hollow like an altar-cup. 

On the other hand, he gets rid of the rhyme 
"born V and " dawn "which originally marred 
verse 9, and in most of the alterations the 
form benefits. 

The second number of "The Germ " came 
out in February and contained only one con- 
tribution by Rossetti, but this was "The 
Blessed Damozel," probably the most famous 
of all his works. It had been written before 
he was nineteen, and must always stand as an 
extraordinary production for a boy of that age, 
in whatever light it is regarded. He was an 
ardent admirer of Edgar Allan Poe ; and, 
speaking in later life to a friend about the 
origin of " The Blessed Damozel," he said : 
" I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was 
possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, 
and so I determined to reverse the conditions, 
and give utterance to the yearning of the loved 
one in Heaven." Poetry, indeed, owes a debt 
of gratitude to the " sainted maiden whom the 
angels name Lenore," if from her sprang the 
immortal creation of ' * The Blessed Damozel ' ' ! 
Rossetti's very name has become associated 
with her ; he painted her over and over again, 
but in verse or on canvas she is always the 
same, the glorified maiden leaning from Heaven 
to speak her thoughts of earth, the like of 
28 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

whom has never been drawn by another hand. 
She may lean from her gold bar in the pictured 
purity of her white lilies and her shining hair, 
or she may utter the words that seem to thrill 
from Heaven to earth, the effect is the same ; 
Rossetti's marvellous creative power is behind 
each : the picture once seen, the poem once 
heard, something has entered into life that was 
not there before, that cannot be ignored, that 
will not pass away. Bunyan's shepherds saw 
the Holy City from afar, Gerontius in his Dream 
was caught up to it, but the " Blessed Damozel' ' 
stood within it, and spoke from out the radiance 
of the " glass and gold, with God for its sun." 
Some readers may stumble at the concrete 
image of the " gold bar of Heaven," but to 
many that, and the vivid imagery throughout 
the poem, seem to reflect the glories of an even 
greater piece of word-painting, that from which 
we glean what knowledge we have of the ' ' City 
that has no need of the sun, neither of the moon 
to shine in it," whose painter did not fear to 
use concrete forms in describing it ; whose 
" foundations . . . were garnished with all 
manner of precious stones," and whose " twelve 
gates were twelve pearls." 

The poem, as originally published in " The 
Germ," was hardly the same in any verse as 
in the editions of the volumes of 1870 and 1881. 
There were twenty-five verses in ' ' The Germ, ' ' 
only twenty-four in the later editions : we 
print from the latest volume, and also give 
some of the earlier renderings from " The 

29 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Germ," so that readers may compare the two, 
and may note the trend of Rossetti's mind in 
the character of these alterations. 

THE BLESSED DAMOZEL 

I 

The blessed damozel leaned out 

From the gold bar of Heaven ; 
Her eyes were deeper than the depth 

Of waters stilled at even ; 
She had three lilies in her hand 

And the stars in her hair were seven. 

[Her blue grave eyes were deeper much 
Than a deep water, even.] 

II 
Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem, 

No wrought flowers did adorn, 
But a white rose of Mary's gift, 

For service meetly worn ; 
Her hair that lay along her back 

Was yellow like ripe corn. 

[But a white rose of Mary's gift 
On the neck meetly worn ;] 

III 

Herseemed she scarce had been a day 

One of God's choristers ; 
The wonder was not yet quite gone 

From that still look of hers ; 
Albeit, to them she left, her day 

Had counted as ten years. 
30 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

IV 
(To one, it is ten years of years. 

. . . Yet now, and in this place, 
Surely she leaned o'er me — her hair 

Fell all about my face. . . . 
Nothing : the autumn-fall of leaves. 

The whole year sets apace.) 

V 
It was the rampart of God's house 

That she was standing on ; 
By God built over the sheer depth 

The which is Space begun ; 
So high, that looking downward thence 

She scarce could see the sun. 

[It was the terrace of God's house] 

VI 
It lies in Heaven, across the flood 

Of ether, as a bridge. 
Beneath, the tides of day and night 

With flame and darkness ridge 
The void, as low as where this earth 

Spins like a fretful midge. 

Then comes, in the first edition, a verse 
omitted later on. 

[But in those tracts, with her, it was 

The peace of utter light 
And silence. For no breeze may stir 

Along the steady flight 
Of seraphim ; no echo there, 

Beyond all depth or height.] 

31 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

VII 
Around her, lovers, newly met 

'Mid deathless love's acclaims, 
Spoke evermore among themselves 

Their heart-remembered names ; 
And the souls mounting up to God 

Went by her like thin flames. 

[Heard hardly, some of her new friends, 

Playing at holy games, 
Spake, gentle-mouthed, among themselves, 

Their virginal chaste names ;] 

VIII 
And still she bowed herself and stooped 

Out of the circling charm ; 
Until her bosom must have made 

The bar she leaned on warm, 
And the lilies lay as if asleep 

Along her bended arm. 

IX 
From the fixed place of Heaven she saw 

Time like a pulse shake fierce 
Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove 

Within the gulf to pierce 
Its path ; and now she spoke as when 

The stars sang in their spheres. 

X 

The sun was gone now ; the curled moon 

Was like a little feather 
Fluttering far down the gulf ; and now 

She spoke through the still weather. 
Her voice was like the voice the stars 

Had when they sang together. 
32 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

XI 

(Ah sweet ! Even now, in that bird's song, 

Strove not her accents there, 
Fain to be hearkened ? When those bells 

Possessed the midday air, 
Strove not her steps to reach my side 

Down all the echoing year ?) 

XII 

11 I wish that he were come to me, 

For he will come," she said. 
" Have I not prayed in Heaven ? — on earth, 

Lord, Lord, has he not pray'd ? 
Are not two prayers a perfect strength ? 

And shall I feel afraid ? 

XIII 
When round his head the aureole clings, 

And he is clothed in white, 
I'll take his hand and go with him 

To the deep wells of light ; 
As unto a stream we will step down, 

And bathe there in God's sight. 

XIV 
We two will stand beside that shrine, 

Occult, withheld, untrod, 
Whose lamps are stirred continually 

With prayer sent up to God ; 
And see our old prayers, granted, melt 

Each like a little cloud. 

[And where each need, revealed, expects 
Its patient period.] 

c 33 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

xv 

" We two will lie i' the shadow of 

That living mystic tree 
Within whose secret growth the Dove 

Is sometimes felt to be, 
While every leaf that His plumes touch 

Saith His name audibly. 

XVI 
" And I myself will teach to him, 

I myself, lying so, 
The songs I sing here ; which his voice 

Shall pause in, hushed and slow, 
And find some knowledge at each pause, 

Or some new thing to know." 

This verse is omitted later. 

[Alas ! to her wise simple mind 
These things were all but known 

Before : they trembled on her sense, — 
Her voice had caught their tone. 

Alas for lonely Heaven ! Alas 
For life wrung out alone !] 

XVII 
(Alas ! we two, we two, thou say'st ! 

Yea, one wast thou with me 
That once of old. But shall God lift 

To endless unity 
The soul whose likeness with thy soul 

Was but its love for thee ?) 

[Alas ! and though the end were reached ? . . . 
Was thy part understood 
Or borne in trust ? And for her sake 
34 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Shall this too be found good ? — 
May the close lips that knew not prayer 
Praise ever, though they would ?] 

XIX 
" We two," she said, " will seek the groves 

Where the Lady Mary is, 
With her five handmaidens, whose names 

Are five sweet symphonies, 
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, 

Margaret and Rosalys. 

XX 

" Circlewise sit they, with bound locks 

And foreheads garlanded ; 
Into the fine cloth white like flame 

Weaving the golden thread, 
To fashion the birth-robes for them 

Who are just born, being dead. 

XXI 
' ' He shall fear, haply, and be dumb. 

Then will I lay my cheek 
To his, and tell about our love, 

Not once abashed or weak : 
And the dear Mother will approve 

My pride, and let me speak. 

XXII 
" Herself shall bring us, hand in hand, 

To Him round whom all souls 
Kneel, the clear-ranged unnumbered head 

Bowed with their aureoles : 

And angels meeting us shall sing 

To their citherns and citoles. 

35 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

XXIII 

" There will I ask of Christ the Lord 
Thus much for him and me : — 

Only to live as once on earth 
With Love, — only to be, 

As then awhile, for ever now 
Together, I and he. 

[" There will I ask of Christ the Lord 

Thus much for him and me : 
To have more blessing than on earth 

In nowise ; but to be 
As then we were, — being as then 

At peace. Yea, verily."] 

Then comes another verse, omitted later. 
[" Yea, verily ; when he is come 

We will do thus and thus : 
Till this my vigil seems quite strange 

And almost fabulous ; 
We two will live at once, one life ; 

And peace shall be with us."] 

XXIV 
She gazed and listened and then said, 

Less sad of speech than mild, — 
" All this is when he comes." She ceased. 

The light thrilled towards her, fill'd 
With angels in strong level flight. 

Her eyes prayed, and she smil'd. 

XXV 

(I saw her smile.) But soon their path 

Was vague in distant spheres : 
And then she cast her arms along 
36 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

The golden barriers, 
And laid her face between her hands, 
And wept. (I heard her tears.) 

Some have cried out at the drop in the last 
verse ; at the sudden fall, as it were, from 
Heaven to earth : the vision glows with the 
glory of " the deep wells of light," of the 
sainted handmaidens, and the shining aureoles ; 
and then it suddenly narrows, and is darkened 
down to this solitary bowed figure, and the 
heavenly music is silenced by her sobs ! But 
this was a characteristic method of the Pre- 
Raphaelites : they often ended their work in a 
minor key ; content to leave behind no sense 
of triumphant attainment, but rather a feeling 
of endless " desiderium," and of endeavour 
baffled only to begin anew. 

Few verbal criticisms can be given, or are 
necessary, on such a poem ; but the comparison 
of the different published forms is interesting 
and instructive, especially as the changes are 
almost invariably improvements. There are, 
of course, obvious instances of Rossetti's faulty 
rhyming, a matter in which he was careless 
to the end ; rhythm was always to his 
ears of far more importance than rhyme. 
Among such instances are " on " rhyming to 
" begun," " spheres " to " pierce," " said " 
to " pray'd," and " cloud " to " God " : in 
verse xix — there was no numbering originally 
of the verses, it has been done here merely to 
avoid confusion in reference — occurs an instance 

37 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

of inaccurate rhyming of which Rossetti was 
fond, that of rhyming words of unequal length 
provided the last syllable was near in sound : 
in this case the rhymes are ' ' is " and ' ' sym- 
phonies." In the original verse which has 
been omitted before verse vii there are marked 
instances of his tendency to carry on the sense 
of a phrase from line to line without a break, 
making the stop in the middle of the line, not 
at the end. It is a trick of style which Browning 
used effectively, but over which Rossetti never 
seemed to gain full mastery. It is in verse xvii 
that the greatest difference is seen between 
the two editions : the earlier form, in its 
concluding lines : 

May the close lips that knew not prayer 
Praise ever, though they would ? 

recalls Mrs. Browning's " Cry of the Human " — 

And lips say " God be pitiful," 

Who ne'er said " God be praised ! " 

In the later, Rossetti strikes a deeper note than 
is usual with him, in the earthly lover's pas- 
sionate question : 

Shall God lift 
To endless unity 
The soul whose likeness with thy soul 
Was but its love for thee ? 

To those who remember the pathetic drama 
of his long engagement and short married life, 
38 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

his devotion to his bride, and his overwhelming 
grief at her early death, it is significant rather 
than strange to note the fact that the later form 
of verse xvii was added after his wife's death. 
Besides many verbal changes, is there not also, 
throughout the poem, a subtle difference between 
the two forms ? The ' ' gentle-mouthed " ' ' new 
friends" who play their "holy games," and 
greet one another with names " chaste " and 
" virginal," have become the "lovers, newly 
met 'mid deathless love's acclaims " ; and the 
names by which they know each other are the 
old " heart- remembered names " of earth, now 
brought to be sanctified, along with all other 
attributes of earthly love, in the perfect Love 
of Heaven. And when the Blessed Damozel 
pictures her own petition before the Throne, 
surely there is the same difference ? At first 
she rises no higher than to beg the gift of 
" peace," that peace they shared once on 
earth, than which she then knew no more. But 
afterwards her knowledge is fuller, the old peace 
no longer satisfies; it is the "Love" she 
now offers again, that which had been the best 
earth had to give, and on which she now asks 
for the seal of Heaven's Eternity. 

The change seems there, for those with eyes 
to read it, and it accords well with Rossetti's 
life-story; for the earlier form of "The 
Blessed Damozel " was written for a family 
magazine before he was nineteen, but by the 
time the latest form appeared he was a man of 
forty- two, and the MS. leaves on which the 

39 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

first poem was inscribed had already lain for 
seven years, buried in the Highgate Cemetery, 
in the coffin of his wife. 



Ill 

THE third number of " The Germ" 
appeared in March, but already its 
continuation was uncertain, a sure 
sign of which being its change of name. It 
was now called " Art and Poetry : Being 
thoughts towards Nature. Conducted princi- 
pally by Artists." Under this more imposing 
and descriptive title the rest of its brief course 
was run ; but it is significant that in tradition 
it lives always only as " The Germ." 

Number III contained two poems by Rossetti, 
both of which had been written during the 
preceding year, when he was taking one of his 
few Continental trips with his friend Mr. Holman 
Hunt. In the later editions of his poems these 
appear severally as lyrics, " Antwerp and 
Bruges," and "The Sea-Limits." In their 
first form they are called respectively "The 
Carillon " and " From the Cliffs : Noon " ; 
the second is an irregular sonnet. The minute 
detail in "The Carillon," even to the note 
below its title, shows strict adherence to the 
Pre-Raphaelite principles, and the poem is 
specially interesting as enabling us to follow the 
thoughts on his travels of this very little- 
travelled poet. 

40 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

THE CARILLON 

[ANTWERP AND BRUGES] 

In these and others of the Flemish towns, the 
"Carillons " or chimes, which have a most fantastic 
and delicate music, are played almost continually. 
The custom is very ancient. 

At Antwerp there is a low wall 
Binding the city, and a moat 
Beneath, that the wind keeps afloat. 

You pass the gates in a slow drawl 

Of wheels. If it is warm at all 
The Carillon will give you thought. 

I climbed the stair in Antwerp church, 
What time the urgent weight of sound 
At sunset seems to heave it round. 
Far up, the Carillon did search 
The wind ; and the birds came to perch 
Far under, where the gables wound. 

In Antwerp harbour on the Scheldt 
I stood along, a certain space 
Of night. The mist was near my face : 

Deep on, the flow was heard and felt. 

The Carillon kept pause, and dwelt 
In music through the silent place. 

At Bruges, when you leave the train, 
A singing numbness in your eyes, — 
The Carillon's first sound appears 
Only the inner moil. Again 
A little minute though — your brain 
Takes quiet, and the whole sense hears. 

41 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

John Memmeling and John Van Eyck 
Hold state at Bruges. In sore shame 
I scanned the works that keep their name. 
The Carillon, which then did strike 
Mine ears, was heard of theirs alike : 
It set me closer unto them. 

I climbed at Bruges all the flight 
The Belfry has of ancient stone. 
For leagues I saw the east wind blown : 

The earth was grey, the sky was white. 

I stood so near upon the height 
That my flesh felt the Carillon. 

Between the lines of the musical little poem 
we can catch glimpses of an unusual picture, 
that of Rossetti as a traveller : we see him in 
Antwerp Church, on the harbour at night with 
the salt mists of the Scheldt wrapping him 
round, trying in Bruges to clear his head from 
that " singing numbness " of the train journey 
so as to fill it with the still abiding presence of 
Memmeling and Van Eyck, and with those 
Flemish Chimes so constantly in his ears that 
it is a relief at last to climb the steps of the 
famous belfry and stand where he feels them 
one with him in bodily form. 

There are only four verses in the later 
editions of the poem, the first and fourth being 
omitted : this may be an improvement artisti- 
cally, but one cannot help prizing the earlier 
lines for the sake of their little personal touches 
of travel-talk, the " slow drawl" of the 
"wheels" as he enters Antwerp, and the 
42 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

vividly accurate description of his feelings in 
the head when he leaves the train at Bruges ! 

It may be questioned, perhaps, whether the 
lyric " The Sea-Limits " is an improvement on 
the irregular sonnet " From the Cliffs " : it is 
the first stanza, with its beautiful imagery and 
the swell of the lines that seems almost that of 
the sea itself, that strikes the ear in each. Here 
is the original version : 

The sea is in its listless chime : 
Time's lapse it is, made audible, — 
The murmur of the earth's large shell. 

In a sad blueness beyond rhyme 

It ends : sense, without thought, can pass 
No stadium further. Since time was, 

This sound hath told the lapse of time. 

No stagnance that death wins, — it hath 

The mournfulness of ancient life, 

Always enduring at dull strife. 
As the world's heart of rest and wrath, 

Its painful pulse is in the sands. 

Last utterly, the whole sky stands, 
Grey and not known, along its path. 

In the later edition the first verse is certainly 
improved by the substitution of " no furlong 
further" for the somewhat pedantic " no 
stadium further " in its first appearance. On 
the other hand, an instance of Rossetti's habit 
of occasionally sacrificing subtle shades of 
meaning for the sake of attaining more musical 
form may be seen in the opening line of verse ii, 

43 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

where the stiff but pregnant phrase "no 
stagnance that death wins " drops to the 
rhythmical but far less expressive words " no 
quiet, which is death's." 

The last number of " The Germ " came out 
in April ; Rossetti contributed to it six sonnets 
on pictures, the outcome of his visit to Belgium, 
and also the beautiful little poem called here 
" Pax Vobis," which was reprinted later as 
" World's Worth." The changes in the later 
edition were considerable, and it seems more 
appropriate to give it here in its original form, 
dated as it appeared in ' ■ The Germ ' ' — Ghent : 
Church of St. Bavon. 

PAX VOBIS 

'Tis of the Father Hilary 

He strove, but could not pray : so took 

The darkened stair, where his feet shook 
A sad blind echo. He kept up 

Slowly. 'Twas a chill sway of air 

That autumn noon within the stair, 
Sick, dizzy, like a turning cup. 

His brain perplexed him, void and thin : 

He shut his eyes and felt it spin ; 

The obscure deafness hemmed him in. 
He said : " The air is calm outside.' ' 

He leaned into the gallery 

Where the chime keeps the night and day : 

It hurt his brain, — he could not pray. 
He had his face upon the stone : 

Deep, 'twixt the narrow shafts, his eye 

Passed all the roofs unto the sky 
44 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Whose greyness the wind swept alone. 
Close by his feet he saw it shake 
With wind in pools that the rains make : 
The ripple set his eyes to ache. 

He said, " Calm hath its peace outside." 

He stood within the mystery 

Girding God's blessed Eucharist : 

The organ and the chaunt had ceased : 
A few words paused against his ear, 

Said from the altar : drawn round him, 

The silence was at rest and dim. 
He could not pray. The bell shook clear 

And ceased. All was great awe, — the breath 

Of God in man, that warranteth 

Wholly the inner things of Faith. 
He said : " There is the world outside." 

In the later edition the last line of the poem 
runs : 

He said : " O God, my world in Thee ! " 

But the priest's wistful look toward the " world 
outside," even from the steps of the altar itself, 
seem better to express Rossetti's attitude to life 
at this time than do the calm words of resigna- 
tion in the later form. 

Of the six sonnets on pictures which Rossetti 
contributed to the last number of " The Germ," 
two are from Bruges, the other four from Paris. 
Their titles are as follows : 

I. " A Virgin and Child," by Hans Mem- 
meling ; in the Academy of Bruges. 
II. " A Marriage of St. Katharine," by the 

45 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

same ; in the Hospital of St. John at 
Bruges. 

III. "A Dance of Nymphs," by Andrea 

Mantegna ; in the Louvre. 

IV. " A Venetian Pastoral," by Giorgione ; 

in the Louvre. 
V. " Angelica rescued from the Sea-Mon- 
ster, ' ' by Ingres ; in the Luxembourg. 
VI. The same. 

Of these we choose No. Ill to print in full, 
not because it is above the others in merit — and 
it is difficult to place them when their subjects 
are so different — but because in it we can see 
most clearly the figure of Rossetti himself 
standing before the picture in the great gallery 
of the Louvre, and can follow his mind 
working out the allegorical thought up to the 
Pre-Raphaelite suggestion in the last lines. 

Below the title of the sonnet comes this note : 

* * * It is necessary to mention that this picture 
would appear to have been in the artist's mind an 
allegory, which the modern spectator may seek vainly 
to interpret. 

Scarcely, I think ; yet it indeed may be 

The meaning reached him, when this music 

rang 
Sharp through his brain, a distinct rapid pang, 
And he beheld these rocks and that ridg'd sea. 
But I believe he just leaned passively, 
And felt their hair carried across his face 
As each nymph passed him ; nor gave ear to 
trace 
46 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

How many feet ; nor bent assuredly 
His eyes from the blind fixedness of thought 
To see the dancers. It is bitter glad 
Even unto tears. Its meaning filleth it, 
A portion of most secret life : to wit : — 
Each human pulse shall keep the sense it had 
With all, though the mind's labour run to nought. 

This is as the sonnet appeared in ' ( The Germ ' ' : 
in the later edition it was called " An Allegorical 
Dance of Women," and the word " girl " is 
substituted for nymph ; for that, and other 
verbal alterations, the reason is not always 
obvious. These sonnets are specially interesting 
as showing the author in the unwonted light of 
a traveller, standing in turn before the great 
pictures of the Netherlands and of France, 
weaving his own beautifully coloured thoughts 
into one garland with the simple, grand beauties 
of those artists of a bygone age. One cannot 
help wondering at times what would Rossetti have 
been had fate, or a little more energy on his 
own part, extended his travels to Italy. If the 
Dutch galleries, and those of Paris, produced at 
once such songs of insight and interpretation, 
what might not the world have had from him 
could he but have stood in the picture galleries 
of Florence or of Rome. 

But there was a lighter side to this journey of 
his with Mr. Holman Hunt, on which it is 
pleasant to dwell, and of which records remain 
in his letters to his brother and to various 
friends. Some of these were addressed to the 
Pre-Raphaelite Brothers on his own and Mr. 

47 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Holman Hunt's behalf, and describe their sight- 
seeing from day to day, their impressions, and 
some of the quainter humours of their travels. 
From Bruges he sends the Brotherhood a 
sonnet which he calls "atrocious," evidently 
written in the train ; and which, particularly 
in the construction of its broken lines, reads 
rather like Browning gone mad ! But so many 
pictures have been given of Rossetti shrouded 
in mystery within the artistic gloom of Cheyne 
Walk that it seems worth while to catch the 
wholesome impress of his figure once again as 
he "jolts" along the "foreign rails," and 
"trundles out of England into France." 

BETWEEN GHENT AND BRUGES 
(Wednesday night, October 24) 

" Ah yes, exactly so ; but when a man 
Has trundled out of England into France 
And half through Belgium, always in this prance 

Of steam, and still has stuck to his first plan — 

Blank verse or sonnets ; and as he began 
Would end ; — why, even the blankest verse may chance 
To falter in default of circumstance, 

And even the sonnet lack its mystic span. 

Trees will be trees, grass grass, pools merely pools, 
Unto the end of time and Belgium — points 

Of fact which Poets (very abject fools) 

Get scent of — once their epithets grown tame 

And scarce. Even to these foreign rails — my joints 

Begin to find their jolting much the same. 

This sonnet, and two of the letters, are given in 
48 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

the "Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters," 
edited by W. M. Rossetti. We quote a few 
passages, again with the object of showing the 
cheerier side of the poet's nature, which perhaps 
is less remembered than his powers of suffering. 

I believe we have seen to-day almost everything 
very remarkable at Bruges ; but I assure you we shall 
want to see much of it again. This is a most stunning 
place, immeasurably the best we have come to. There 
is a quantity of first-rate architecture, and very little 
or no Rubens. But by far the best of all are the 
miraculous works of Memling and Van Eyck. . . . 
I forgot to mention that Memling 's pictures in the 
Hospital of St. John were presented to the institution 
by that stunner in return for the care bestowed upon 
him when he was received here, severely wounded and 
in great want, after the Battle of Nancy. . . . Before 
leaving Ghent we visited the great Convent of the 
town — the Beguinage. It is of a vast extent, con- 
taining entire streets and squares of its own. Each 
nun has a house to herself, over which is written not 
her name, but that of some saint under whose protec- 
tion she has been pleased to put it. In some cases 
where the name was more than usually quaint, we 
felt disposed to knock at the door and to ask if he was 
in ; but refrained, as it was rather late, and we feared 
he might be gone to bed. We witnessed the vesper 
service, which rather surprised us, as we thought that 
among the tunes played we could recognize "Jim 
Crow " and " Nix my Dolly." At the end, each nun 
finds a kind of towel somewhere, which she folds up 
and puts on the top of her head ; during the service, 
a rather sloshy one goes about with a policeman's 
bull's-eye, collecting coppers. At our entrance and 
d 49 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

departure, Hunt dipped his ringers in the holy-water 
stoup, and commenced some violent gesticulations, 
which I was obliged to bring to an abrupt conclu- 
sion. 

We have bought an extraordinary self-concocting 
coffee-pot for state occasions of the P.R.B. We have 
likewise purchased a book containing a receipt for 
raising the Devil, and in Paris a quantity of Gavarni's 
sketches, which I long to look over with you. 

The buoyant good fellowship that breathes 
throughout these letters is thoroughly charac- 
teristic of the writer, and they form a pleasant, 
homely background for the rich outpourings 
of his poetical genius by which he led his 
enthusiastic Brotherhood. 

Rossetti's attitude to religion was always one 
of artistic reverence that was almost adoration, 
although he belonged to no special creed. He 
was not a Catholic, but he was steeped in the 
traditions of Catholicism in its widest sense, 
and his religious expression was always nearer 
to that of our own day than to an age round 
which Puritan shadows seemed still to linger. 
An instance of this was his attitude toward 
the publication later on of the poem " Ave," 
which was probably written about this time, 
though not published till 1870. It seems to 
echo some of his visits to the grand Catholic 
churches of the Continent, and rings with the 
simplicity of devotion fitting to such a subject. 
It is a religious lyric addressed to the Virgin, 
and forms a meet fellow to his great picture 
" Ecce Ancilla Domini," begun as an oil- 
50 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

painting in 1850, the year after his tour with 
Holman Hunt. But his brother mentions with 
what great hesitation he inserted it in the 
volume for publication on account of the outlook 
toward Catholicism which it seems to imply. 
Rossetti himself writes : 

" I hesitated to print ' Ave ' because of the 
subject, but I thought it well done, and so 
included it." And to those of our own day 
who search his pages for the somewhat scanty 
number of poems dealing with religious sub- 
jects, there can hardly be any lines which will 
appeal more than those which picture, with an 
almost Biblical simplicity, the Mother's solemn 
waiting "in the house of John" for the 
return of Him who was at once the Christ-Child 
and the King. 

Mindst thou not (when the twilight gone 

Left darkness in the house of John) 

Between the naked window-bars 

That spacious vigil of the stars ? 

For thou, a watcher even as they, 

Wouldst rise from where throughout the day 

Thou wroughtest raiment for His poor ; 

And rinding the fixed terms endure 

Of day and night which never brought 

Sounds of his coming chariot, 

Wouldst lift through cloud-waste unexplor'd 

Those eyes which said, " How long, O Lord ? " 

Then that disciple whom He loved, 

Well heeding, haply would be moved 

To ask thy blessing in His name ; 

And that one thought in both, the same 

5i 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Though silent, then would clasp ye round 
To weep together, — tears long bound, 
Sick tears of patience, dumb and slow. 
Yet, " Surely I come quickly," — so 
He said, from life and death gone home. 
Amen : even so, Lord Jesus, come ! 

To those whose faith is quickened by the 
re-creation of sacred scenes, there can be few 
lines more exquisitely satisfying than these. 
Students who care alike for Rossetti's pictures 
and his poetry must always associate ' ' Ave ' ' 
with his " Ecce Ancilla Domini," which had 
been completed in March 1850, just before 
the publication of the last number of " The 
Germ." The face of Mary was that of his 
sister Christina, the angel Gabriel was founded 
on that of Woolner. F. G. Stephens thus 
describes the picture : 

In a chamber, whose pure white sides and floor 
exhibit an intensity of soft morning light, the couch 
of Mary, itself almost entirely white, is placed close 
to the wall where dawn would strike its earliest rays, 
and with its head towards the window. A scanty 
blue curtain shaded the face of the sleeper ; behind, 
attached to the wall, a lamp (such as in antique 
chambers was rarely extinguished, and supposed 
efficacious against evil spirits) is still alight, although 
it is broad day without, and the sun reveals the tree 
growing close to the opening. At the foot of the 
couch, Mary's embroidery frame, with a lily unfinished 
on the bright red cloth which was the sole piece of 
strong colour in the picture, bespeaks one of those 
52 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

domestic occupations painters have agreed to ascribe 
to the Maiden Mother. 

There is the same thought in the line of "Ave' ' : 

Thou wroughtest raiment for His poor. 

The history of this great picture is significant 
of the early difficulties which beset the Pre- 
Raphaelite school of painters, and of the way 
in which they were overcome. In i§50 the pic- 
ture was priced at £50, and was returned unsold 
from the gallery in Regent Street where it had 
been exhibited. Three years later it was bought 
for the same sum by Mr. McCracken of Belfast, 
one of Rossetti's earliest patrons. It was sold 
after his death, and changed hands more than 
once : in 1874 it was bought by Mr. William 
Graham for £388 10s., and lent by him to the 
Academy Winter Exhibition of 1883, shortly 
after Rossetti's death. In 1886 it was pur- 
chased for the National Gallery of British Art 
(the Tate Gallery), out of a fund bequeathed by 
the late John Lucas Walker, for the sum of 
£840. In the Tate Gallery it is now No. 1210. 

In his earlier picture dealing with the same 
theme, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," his 
sister Christina had also been his model ; and his 
mother had sat for St. Anne. He had worked 
at it in his old home in Charlotte Street, as is 
shown by the following entry in the " Journal " 
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for July 
1849 : " Sunday, 27th. Gabriel and I went in the 
morning, by appointment, to Dickenson's [Lowes 
Dickenson], where we met Ford Brown and 

53 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Cave Thomas. Dickenson says that, when 
Cottinham first mentioned to him his intention 
of buying Gabriel's picture, he descanted glow- 
ingly on his genius, and expressed his horror at 
having ' found him in a garret. ' ' ' 

To this entry Mr. W. M. Rossetti adds a note : 
" This would be the room appropriated to my 
brother and myself at the top of our family 
residence, 50 Charlotte Street, Portland Place. 
It was certainly an anti-luxurious apartment, 
but we had, of course, the run of the rest of the 
house." 

The entry and the note form together a good 
instance of the way in which, by a slightly 
fanciful colouring, facts may be considerably 
distorted. Rossetti "ina garret " is doubtless 
a far more picturesque figure than Rossetti 
sharing a big upstairs room with his brother in 
his old home ; but it is pleasant to know which 
picture is true to life. " The Girlhood of Mary 
Virgin," his first oil-painting, he sold to the 
Marchioness Dowager of Bath, in whose family 
his aunt, Miss Charlotte Polidori, had been 
governess for some years : so the architect 
Cottinham's pity for the garret-housed artist 
did not go the length of making him buy his 
picture ! 



54 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

IV 

ABOUT the year 1850 he left his father's 
house, where he had been living, while 
sharing a studio with Madox Brown and 
Holman Hunt, and took rooms at 14 Chatham 
Place, Blackfriars : the rooms have since been 
demolished ; they were situated near the north- 
east corner of the bridge, and had a fine view 
over the river. His friendship with the Brown- 
ings dates from this period, and the subjects of 
several of his pictures are to be found in Robert 
Browning's verse ; among such are " ' Hist ! ' 
said Kate the Queen," from "Pippa Passes," 
and "The Laboratory," his first completed 
water-colour. 

After its issue in April 1850, "The Germ" 
had died, but it had left Rossetti with an 
established poetical reputation, and it had a 
brilliant successor in " The Oxford and Cam- 
bridge Magazine," which ran throughout the 
year 1856. The editor was William Fulford ; 
among his supporters were Burne-Jones, Wil- 
liam Morris, and Canon Dixon, all at the time 
undergraduates, and Rossetti gave them willing 
help and encouragement. The magazine 
carried on the doctrines of the Pre-Raphaelite 
school for the brief year of its existence, and 
lovers of Rossetti should not fail to make 
acquaintance with the 776 closely written pages, 
in double columns, of the now rare volume. It 
is full of good reading, and contains essays, 
tales, and poetry, and what are modestly styled 

55 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

" notices " of books ; these comprise good 
solid reviews of much that is now standard 
work ; for instance, nineteen pages of double 
column on Browning's " Men and Women" 
and twenty-six on the third volume of Ruskin's 
" Modern Painters." 

As far as Rossetti is concerned, the magazine 
is of special interest in giving a different opening 
verse to that usually published in " The Burden 
of Nineveh." The lines are nearer to comic 
verse than the poet generally allows himself, 
and show him again as the ironical observer 
of everyday discomforts he had been while 
travelling abroad with Holman Hunt ; they 
also show that he had a rapid succession of 
correct rhymes to his hand when he cared to 
use them ! 

In the magazine, below the title of the poem, 
comes the heading : " Burden. * Heavy 
calamity ; the chorus of a song. ' Dictionary ' ' ; 
and then this opening verse : 

I have no taste for polyglot : 
At the Museum was my lot, 
Just once, to jot and blot and rot 
In Babel for I know not what. 

I went at two, I left at three. 
Round those still floors I tramp'd to win 
By the great porch the dirt and din ; 
And as I made the last door spin 
And issued, they were hoisting in 

A winged beast from Nineveh. 

The poem had been written about six years 
before, and there had been some talk of pub- 
56 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

lishing it in a projected journal called " The 
Pen." 

The opening stanza might represent Rossetti 
himself, with the contrast between his nature 
and his circumstances ; those " living eyes " 
that still can see ' ' dead Greece ' ' so plainly 
through " London dirt and din." He watches 
the new treasure, " the winged beast from 
Nineveh,' ' carried to its new home in the British 
Museum, and every detail of the picture is filled 
in, as he loved to fill it either with pen or brush. 
" The winged beast " rises before our eyes as 
we read, plain in every point of hoof and flank 
and human face : we see, as the poet saw, the 
life of Nineveh re-create itself before us, until 
this seems 

The very corpse of Nineveh. 

Jonah, Sardanapalus, Senacherib, Semiramis, 
rise in turn before us ; then we seem to watch 
the " winged beast " borne to its place in the 
Museum, and the contrast is overwhelming — 
almost from the sublime to the ridiculous : 

Now, thou poor god, within this hall 
Where the blank windows blind the wall 
From pedestal to pedestal, 
The kind of light shall on thee fall 

Which London takes the day to be : 
While school-foundations in the act 
Of holiday, three files compact, 
Shall learn to view thee as a fact 
Connected with that zealous tract : 

" Rome, — Babylon and Nineveh." 

57 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

The glory of the Old World passes again 
before the poet's view, and he sees the Museum 
as the resting-place for all that remains of that 
glory, united here only as relics : the one thing 
common to the past and the present is " that 
dumb presence of the sky." He traces the 
grandeur of those vanished kingdoms, from 
the Temptation in the Wilderness till the day 
when our London, with its present wealth 
and civilization, may have sunk beneath the 
sway of some Australian kingdom yet to 
be ; or further still, till a time when the 
very presence of the Ninevite god may shake 
the belief of future ages in the Christianity of 
to-day. 

The day when he, Pride's lord and man's, 
Showed all the kingdoms at a glance 
To Him before whose countenance 
The years recede, the years advance, 

And said, " Fall down and worship me" :-^ 
'Mid all the pomp beneath that look, 
Then stirred there, haply, some rebuke, 
Where to the wind the Salt Pools shook, 
And in those tracts, of life forsook, 

That knew thee not, O Nineveh ! 



It seemed in one same pageantry 
They followed forms which had been erst ; 
To pass, till on my sight should burst 
That future of the best or worst 
When some may question which was first, 

Of London or of Nineveh. 



58 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

For as that Bull-god once did stand 
And watched the burial-clouds of sand, 
Till these at last without a hand 
Rose o'er his eyes, another land, 

And blinded him with destiny : — 
So may he stand again ; till now, 
In ships of unknown sail and prow, 
Some tribe of the Australian plough 
Bear him afar, — a relic now 

Of London, not of Nineveh ! 

Or it may chance indeed that when 
Man's age is hoary among men, — 
His centuries threescore and ten, — 
His furthest childhood shall seem then 

More clear than later times may be : 
Who, finding in this desert place 
This form, shall hold us for some race 
That walked not in Christ's lowly ways, 
But bowed its pride and vowed its praise 

Unto the God of Nineveh. 

In the last verse we see the poet once more ; 
he smiles, and then comes the thought that 
drives out smiles : he scans again the heavy, 
sculptured sightless figure, and thinks of the 
irony of such an image standing for God to a 
mighty nation, 

The smile rose first, — anon drew nigh 

The thought : . . . Those heavy wings spread high, 

So sure of flight, which do not fly ; 

That set gaze never on the sky ; 

Those sculptured flanks it cannot see ; 
Its crown, a brow-contracting load ; 

59 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Its planted feet which trust the sod : . . . 
(So grew the image as I trod :) 
Nineveh, was this thy God, 
Thine also, mighty Nineveh ? 

" The Blessed Damozel " was reprinted in 
" The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine," and 
Rossetti also contributed to it " Staff and Scrip," 
a poem written in modified ballad verse. Of 
its origin his brother tells us that on September 
1 8, 1849, "just before starting for the Conti- 
nent, he wrote to me that he had observed in 
the ' Gesta Romanorum ' a story, of which he 
sent me a modified prose version of his own, 
naming it ' The Scrip and Staff ' : this was the 
foundation of his poem bearing nearly the same 
title, and written, I think, not immediately 
afterwards, but within two or three years 
ensuing. His letter of September expressed 
his intention of versifying this tale, and also 
another story of his own invention, which may, 
I suppose, have been the ' Last Confession.' " 

' ' The Staff and Scrip " is a poem of mediaeval 
chivalry, and seems to echo Swinburne and 
William Morris in its rich imagery and high- 
souled romance. In " The Oxford and Cam- 
bridge Magazine ' ' it had the following heading, 
which was, however, omitted in the later 
editions : 

"How should I your true love know 

From another one? " 
11 By his cockle hat and staff 

And his sandal-shoon." 
60 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

The Queen and the Pilgrim come together in 
the old relation of oppressed and deliverer : he 
goes to fight her battle against Duke Luke, who 
has spoiled her lands, and in their first and only 
meeting the pilgrim recognizes her as the sainted 
lady of his dreams. 

The Queen sat idle by her loom : 

She heard the arras stir, 
And looked up sadly : through the room 

The sweetness sickened her 
Of musk and myrrh. 

Her women, standing two and two, 

In silence combed the fleece. 
The Pilgrim said, " Peace be with you, 

Lady " ; and bent his knees. 
She answered, " Peace." 

Her eyes were like the wave within ; 

Like water-reeds the poise 
Of her soft body, dainty thin ; 

And like the water's noise 
Her plaintive voice. 

For him, the stream had never well'd 

In desert tracts malign 
So sweet ; nor had he ever felt 

So faint in the sunshine 
Of Palestine. 

Right so, he knew that he saw weep 

Each night through every dream 
The Queen's own face, confused in sleep 
With visages supreme 
Not known to him. 

61 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

He offers his help against her foe Duke Luke, 
and when she hesitates to link him with her 
fallen fortunes, he urges his claim, 

For my vow's sake. 

The ballad throughout is mystical ; and to the 
end the exact nature of his vow, which " God 
heard . . . there as here," is never told : it 
seemed to involve the sacrifice of himself to 
her service, and to expect no union between 
them until 

Not tithed with days' and years' decease 
He pays thy wage He owed. 

The Queen accepts his service, and he goes 
forth to the fight, leaving with * ' one among her 
train ' ' his staff and scrip to be given her on the 
morrow : he foresaw his fate, and knew it was 
an " in memoriam " gift he sent her. And she 
too sent gifts to her knight, to fit him for the 
morrow's battle — a sword, a banner, and a 
shield. 

She sent him a sharp sword, whose belt 

About his body there 
As sweet as her own arms he felt. 

He kissed its blade, all bare, 
Instead of her. 

She sent him a green banner wrought 

With one white lily stem, 
To bind his lance with when he fought. 
He writ upon the same 
And kissed her name. 
62 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

She sent him a white shield, whereon 

She bade that he should trace 
His will. He blent fair hues that shone, 

And in a golden space 
He kissed her face. 

Born of the day that died, that eve 

Now dying sank to rest ; 
As he, in likewise taking leave, 

Once with a heaving breast 
Looked to the west. 

And there the sunset skies unseal'd, 

Like lands he never knew, 
Beyond to-morrow's battlefield 

Lay open out of view 
To ride into. 

Perhaps those last two verses are the most 
musical in the ballad which Canon Dixon called 
" the finest of all Rossetti's poems, and one of 
the most glorious writings in the language. It 
exhibits," he said, "in flawless perfection the 
gift that he had above all other writers, absolute 
beauty and pure action." 

And in the story the pale Queen Blanchelys 
among her maidens awaited the issue of the fight, 
and performed with them the woman's part of 
watching, fast, and prayer : the rhythm of the 
verse seems to catch the quiver of their failing 
voices : 

Weak now to them the voice o' the priest 

As any trance affords ; 
And when each anthem failed and ceas'd, 
It seemed that the last chords 
Still sang the words. 

63 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Then came the first signs of the finished fight, 
eagerly reported from maiden to maiden ; and 

the Queen held her breath and heard, 
And said, " It is the cry 
Of Victory." 

But the price of victory had been heavy : 

the horses shook the ground : 
And in the thick of them 
A still band came. 

" Oh what do ye bring out of the fight, 
Thus hid beneath these boughs ? " 

* * Thy conquering guest returns to-night, 
And yet shall not carouse, 
Queen, in thy house." 

" Uncover ye his face," she said. 

" Oh changed in little space ! " 
She cried, ' ' O pale that was so red ! 

O God, O God of grace ! 
Cover his face." 

His sword was broken in his hand 

Where he had kissed the blade. 
" O soft steel that could not withstand ! 

O my hard heart unstayed, 
That prayed and prayed ! " 

His bloodied banner crossed his mouth 

Where he had kissed her name. 
" O east, and west, and north, and south, 
Fair flew my web, for shame, 
To guide Death's aim ! " 
64 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

The tints were shredded from his shield 

Where he had kissed her face. 
" Oh, of all gifts that I could yield, 

Death only keeps its place, 
My gift and grace ! " 

Then stepped a damsel to her side, 
And spoke, and needs must weep : 

" For his sake, lady, if he died, 

He prayed of thee to keep 

This staff and scrip." 

And faithfully she kept them : " that night 
they hung above her bed," wet with her tears ; 
and year after year they held their place amid 
the changing scenes of the palace life. 

And once she woke with a clear mind 

That letters writ to calm 
Her soul lay in the scrip ; to find 

Only a torpid balm 
And dust of palm. 

In the early edition of the poem, in " The 
Oxford and Cambridge Magazine," a pretty 
touch of colour is added in the fourth line of that 
verse, which runs there : 

Pink shells : a torpid balm. 

So she lived her ' ' Queen 's life, ' ' faithful always 
to his memory, until from her bed's head, where 
they had hung throughout ten waiting years, 
the Pilgrim's staff and scrip were brought to 
the chapel and hung above her bier ; for hers is 
e 65 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

A Queen's death now : as now they shake 

To gusts in chapel dim, — 
Hung where she sleeps, not seen to wake 

(Carved lovely white and slim), 
With them by him. 

Stand up to-day, still armed, with her, 

Good knight, before His brow 
Who then as now was here and there, 

Who had in mind thy vow 
Then even as now. 

The lists are set in Heaven to-day, 

The bright pavilions shine ; 
Fair hangs thy shield, and none gainsay 

The trumpets sound in sign 
That she is thine. 

Not tithed with days' and years' decease 

He pays thy wage He owed, 
But with imperishable peace 

Here in His own abode, 
Thy jealous God. 

The poem is mystical to the end : in the story 
from the " Gesta Romanorum," on which it is 
founded, and which is called "The Bloody 
Shirt, ' ' the princess who is the heroine has been 
" stered to synne " by her enemy, before the 
coming of her champion. But in the "Staff 
and Scrip " there seems no such suggestion, or 
it is not made obvious : the two stories resemble 
one another at the end, and the shirt in the one 
poem and the staff and scrip in the other hang 
always above the lady's bed to remind her of 
66 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

her dead champion, and to keep her faithful 
to his memory. The verses breathe to the full 
that pious mysticism which Rossetti, himself 
an adherent to no creed, had inherited from 
Italian ancestry, and which made his few poems 
which deal with religious subjects rise to such a 
height of devotional fervour. 

The " Staff and Scrip " is written in early 
ballad form, but, unlike " Troy Town" and 
" Eden Bower," it has no refrain : it probably 
contains as large a number of faulty rhymes 
as any one of Rossetti's poems ; the arrange- 
ment of the rhymes, three and two, lending 
itself to this defect. " Dream " rhymes to 
' l supreme ' ' and ' ' him " ; ' ' fellowship ' ' to 
' ' keep ' ' and ' ' scrip ' ' ; " stem " to ' ' name ' ' ; 
' ' ail ' ' to ' ' well ' ' ; " yet ' ' to ' ' great ' ' ; and 
"owed" to "God." 



BETWEEN the years of "The Germ" 
and "The Oxford and Cambridge 
Magazine " Rossetti's reputation as a 
painter was steadily increasing among those 
whose judgment was of value. But prices did 
not run high. In 1853 his staunch Belfast 
admirer, William McCracken, bought his 
masterpiece, " Dante on the Anniversary of 
Beatrice's Death," for the noble sum of £35. 
It seems to have been about the same time that 
his famous picture ' ' Found ' ' was begun : this 
represents a smock-frocked country lover trying 

67 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

to raise from the ground the beautiful, dis- 
hevelled form of his lost love, whose face gleams 
wan and marred in the early morning light 
against the wall by which she crouches. The 
calf in the cart, imprisoned beneath a net, gives 
an allegorical force to the picture : it was never 
finished ; Rossetti worked on it, at intervals, 
almost to the time of his death. At this period 
of his career his circle of friends was large, and 
his magnetic personality such that all hailed 
him as a leader. He kept to the end of his 
life the great power he had of inspiring affec- 
tion ; and in his earlier years he was a 
genial, warm-hearted, sometimes passionate 
comrade, in a brilliant band of painters, poets, 
and thinkers. Owing to the hermit-like exist- 
ence of his later years, due partly to ill-health, 
he is apt to be remembered rather as an aesthetic 
recluse, of morbid and unwholesome habits ; 
but if one would judge a man by what he was in 
his prime, even if it end prematurely, this was 
not his real nature. All will agree that there 
can be no better judge of his aims and character 
than his brother, who was also his lifelong friend 
and companion : these are his words, in con- 
nexion with some of Rossetti 's early letters : 
" I think the readers will say that, whatever 
else Dante Rossetti may have been, he was a 
quick-blooded, downright-speaking man, with 
plenty of will and an abundant lack of humbug. 
People who take an interest in him may depend 
upon it that the more they learn about him — 
of an authentic kind — the more will the mascu- 
68 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

line traits of his character appear in evidence, 
and the less will room be left for the notion of a 
pallid and anaemic sesthete, a candidate for the 
sunflowers of a Du Maurier design. He did not 
' yearn.' All this is said without at all deroga- 
ting from the fact that in the very essence of his 
mind and temperament Dante Rossetti was a 
poet — a poet who expressed himself in verse 
and in form and colour." It is possible that 
some of the strong associations that have clung 
to Rossetti 's memory, of dark rooms, unhealthy 
habits, and morbid fancies, are due to the fact 
that his magnetic personality drew to him in 
later life kindred literary spirits of the day ; and 
that, as his day waned, they penned their last 
faithful portraits of him with genius, that sheds 
a merciless, unblinking light on those last 
pathetic days, that was never cast on his earlier 
and more vigorous years. 

He cannot be judged merely as an English 
poet ; though he was born in London and spent 
his life in England, he was by race three parts 
Italian, and being painter as well as a poet, 
he strove to write with the same merciless 
truth to nature with which he strove to paint : 
had Robert Buchanan realized Rossetti's genius 
as a painter, he might have seen in it the explana- 
tion of much that offended his dry Scottish 
susceptibilities, and the fatal article in the 
"Contemporary Review" might never have 
seen the light. Hall Caine, one of Rossetti's 
later friends, said of him that he belonged to 
Italy, not to England, and to the sixteenth or 

69 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

even the thirteenth century, rather than the 
nineteenth ; yet it was not his surroundings 
that produced this effect, they were British, 
almost " Cockney " : the glorious insight he 
showed by pen and brush alike into the spirit of 
all that Italy has stood for in the past was his 
by birth, nowhere acquired, nowhere assisted : 
in hired studios, in his Chelsea house, or among 
his wild beasts and his sheltering trees, he 
walked always the same ; a child of the South, 
who should have lived in the sunshine of that 
kingdom of Naples whence his father came. 
When one sees what Italy did for Browning, 
one cannot but picture what it might have done 
for Rossetti : his friends tried to send him 
there, but without success ; he may have 
dreaded the effect on his own nature of a mere 
visit there and then the return to England : the 
fact remains, and it heightens the value of his 
creative power, that " The Blessed Damozel " 
was conceived, the " Last Confession " penned, 
such portraits drawn as " Sister Helen," " Rose 
Mary," and the women of the sonnets, in no 
more inspiring atmosphere than that of London 
smoke and fog. 

The figure of the great poet-painter remains 
perhaps too clearly with us as he was in his 
later years, worn by suffering, mental and 
physical ; but we can re-create his portrait in 
earlier happier years, and see him as he was 
by nature, cheery, impulsive, and full of quaint 
humour, in many of his own letters, in those 
from his friends, and in the pages of the " Pre- 
70 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Raphaelite Journal." From such are the fol- 
lowing extracts, only a few from the wealth of 
material to be enjoyed by students at their 
leisure. 

In 1850 Rossetti writes from Sevenoaks to 
Mr. John Tupper, one of the associates of the 
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a description of 
painting in the open air, so vivid and humorous 
that it is worth inserting as a characteristic 
production. W. M. Rossetti says: "The 
subject of my brother's picture was to be ' The 
Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in the Garden 
of Eden ' ; but the landscape background which 
he now painted was finished up years afterwards 
for a subject of quite another kind, named ' The 
Bower-meadow.'" After describing to Mr. 
Tupper his hasty flight from town, Rossetti 
goes on : 

My canvas is a whopper again, more than seven feet 
long. Ai ! Ai ! Hunt [Holman] gets on swimmingly 
— yesterday, indeed, a full inch over the ankles : I 
myself had to sketch under the canopy of heaven, 
without a hat, and with my umbrella tied over my 
head to my buttonhole — a position which, will you 
oblige me by remembering, I expressly desired should 
be selected for my statue — (N.B. Trousers turned 
up). This last item is chiefly to suit Woolner's ideas 
of sculpture, should he get the commission. Stephens, 
being under a course of philosophy, paints in the house. 
His band is still, however, an inch or so short of 
Epicurus's. To-day I began painting on my picture 
in the park ; and began to profit by the views of the 
public thereon. One man told another that I was 

7i 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

drawing a map, and analysed my outline to that end. 
One boy was kicked by another for insulting me by 
doubting that my landscape was meant for a deer. I 
saw the back of a pair of top-boots, and a cut-away 
coat ; Lord Amherst, I was told, was sneaking inside, 
but he refrained from exposing either his person or 
his ideas on Art. His house is visited with artists in 
Egyptian swarms, poor wretch ! Hunt remarked, 
" How disagreeable to enter one of your rooms for 
the purpose of delivering a soliloquy ; and find a man 
there behind an easel," which was bobbish for 
Hunt. 

The cold here is awful when it does not rain, and 
then the rain is awful. " And what shall guard me 
but my naked love ? " — and a railway rug. . . . 

On January i, 1853, he writes of his picture 
" Ecce Ancilla Domini," now in the Tate 
Gallery, to his friend Madox Brown : 

This afternoon the blessed white eyesore will be 
finished. Therefore, if you have any last directions 
about your pictures now in Green's hands, you had 
better give them. Yesterday after giving up the 
angel's head as a bad job (owing to William's male- 
volent expression), at about one o'clock I took to 
working it up out of my own intelligence, and got it 
better by a great deal than it has yet been. I have 
put a gilt saucer behind his head, which crowns the 
" China "-ese character of the picture. 

It is plain that in his life Rossetti did not 
lack humour, though little enough of it has 
clung to his memory, and that for two reasons : 
one, already stated, the fact that the most life- 
72 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

like portraits left of him date from his later 
days, when bad health and consequent bad 
habits had warped the natural man, and the 
other that his work in art and poetry aimed at 
ideals in which humour had no part. But all 
the more because this is so, should we try in 
studying Rossetti's life to recall faithfully the 
impression of what he was in his prime : a 
genial companion among friends of whom he 
formed the moving spirit ; one whose jest was 
heard, and whose laugh rang out even amid the 
high-souled utterances of the Pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood. 

His ordinary language had little about it of 
the languid aesthete : Coventry Patmore's 
poem in the first number of " The Germ " he 
describes as "stunning"; his own ballad, 
" The King's Tragedy," while in construction, 
he speaks of as " a ripper " ; he loved the Pre- 
Raphaelite word ' ' sloshy ' ' for denoting slip- 
shod work ; and nowhere can be found a more 
charming piece of vigorous English than in his 
letter to his friend Allingham, the Irish poet, 
on his difficulty in painting one of the ( ' models" 
in his great picture " Found." 

The letter is dated November 1854, an d is 
written from Finchley. 

At present I am hard at work out here on my picture, 
painting the calf and cart. It has been fine clear 
weather, though cold, till now, but these two days the 
rain has set in (for good, I fear), and driven me to my 
wits' end, as even were I inclined to paint notwith- 

73 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

standing, the calf would be like a hearth-rug after 
half an hour's rain ; but I suppose I must turn out 
to-morrow and try. A very disagreeable part of the 
business is that I am being obliged to a farmer whom 
I cannot pay for his trouble in providing calf and all, 
as he insists on being good-natured. As for the calf, 
he kicks and fights all the time he remains tied up, 
which is five or six hours daily, and the view of life 
induced at his early age by experience in art appears 
to be so melancholy that he punctually attempts 
suicide by hanging himself at 3 4- daily p.m. At these 
times I have to cut him down, and then shake him 
up and lick him like blazes. There is a pleasure in 
it, my dear fellow : the Smithfield drovers are a kind 
of opium-eaters at it, but a moderate practitioner 
might perhaps sustain an argument. I hope soon to 
be back at my rooms, as I have been quite long enough 
at my " rhumes." (The above joke did service for 
MacCrac's benefit last night.) 

Many of Rossetti's letters to Allingham, 
Hall Caine, Madox Brown, and to his family are 
public property now ; and nowhere can there 
be better seen, side by side with that creative 
touch of genius with which he dignified the 
commonest actions and objects, the honest 
enjoyment he took in the humorous occurrences 
of everyday life. 

We return to his poetry : it is difficult to date 
exactly much of his work, especially as he altered 
and added to his poems to an extent beyond that 
of most authors. 

The influence of his friends Swinburne and 
Morris is clear in such work as " Staff and 
74 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Scrip ; ' ' that of Browning is strongly marked 
in the long poem, a dramatic monologue in 
blank verse, ' ' A Last Confession. ' ' 

The story falls here from the dying lips of an 
Italian patriot, who gasps out his " last con- 
fession " to the listening priest. It is not of 
his injuries he thinks, of the wound he gave 
the Austrian, 

whose white coat I still made match 
With his white face, only the two grew red 
As suits his trade. 

It is not the approach of death that troubles 
him, or the dread of mortal pain ; it is the fear 
lest he will not have strength to make his con- 
fession plain ; and so he cries : 

Give me a draught of water in that cup ; 

My voice feels thick ; perhaps you do not hear ; 

But you must hear. If you mistake my words 

And so absolve me, I am sure the blessing 

Will burn my soul. If you mistake my words 

And so absolve me, Father, the great sin 

Is yours, not mine : mark this : your soul shall burn 

With mine for it. 

And then in fevered accents he tells the 
pathetic tale of his life : how while famine 
devastated his land, he had found upon the hill- 
side a baby-girl, whose parents had abandoned 
her to the death by starvation they could not 
prevent. Boy as he was, he had accepted the 
charge, and had taken the child to share his 
own poor home. 

75 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

I was young, 
Scarce man then, Father : but the cause 

which gave 
The wounds I die of now had brought me then 
Some wounds already ; and I lived alone, 
As any hiding hunted man must live. 
It was no easy thing to keep a child 
In safety, for herself it was not safe, 
And doubled my own danger : but I knew 
That God would help me. 

Then he goes back to the story of those early 
days, and their life together among the hills : he 
tells of his care for her, and of her pretty loving 
ways, and a forecast of their future rings in 
one scene that he recalls. He had brought her 
from the city, 

When she was still a merry loving child, — 

The earliest gift I mind my giving her ; 

A little image of a flying Love 

Made of our coloured glass-ware, in his hands 

A dart of gilded metal and a torch. 

He dwelt on her pleasure in the toy, her eager, 
childish questions about it, and her wish to 
hang it herself upon her chamber wall, " front- 
ing her little bed " : so he had held her up in 
his arms while she drove in the nail with the 
heavy pruning-hook that did duty as a hammer. 
Then : 

Just as she hung the image on the nail, 
It slipped and all its fragments strewed the ground : 
And as it fell she screamed, for in her hand 
The dart had entered deeply and drawn blood. 
76 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

And so her laughter turned to tears : and Oh ! 
I said, the while I bandaged the small hand, 
That I should be the first to make you bleed, 
Who love and love and love you ! kissing still 
The fingers till I got her safe to bed. 
And still she sobbed, Not for the pain at all, 
She said, but for the Love, the poor good Love 
You gave me. So she cried herself to sleep. 

The childish memory of the broken image, 
the " poor good Love " that had brought her 
nothing but evil, came back to him now as he 
lay dying, with the priest waiting to give him 
absolution. 

His had been the old story : as the waif he 
had saved grew from a merry child to a beautiful 
maiden, so his feeling for her grew from that 
of guardian to lover. 

the first love 
I had — the father's, brother's love — was changed, 
I think, in some wise ; like a holy thought 
Which is a prayer before one knows of it. 

So the great change took place, though out- 
wardly their life ran still in the old groove. 

I was a moody comrade to her then, 
For all the love I bore her. Italy, 
The weeping desolate mother, long has claimed 
Her sons' strong arms to lean on, and their hands 
To lop the poisonous thicket from her path, 
Cleaving her way to light. And from her need 
Had grown the fashion of my whole poor life 
Which I was proud to yield her, as my father 
Had yielded his. And this had come to be 

77 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

A game to play, a love to clasp, a hate 
To wreak, all things together that a man 
Needs for his blood to ripen ; till at times 
All else seemed shadows, and I wondered still 
To see such life pass muster and be deemed 
Time's bodily substance. In those hours, no doubt, 
To the young girl my eyes were like my soul, 
Dark wells of death-in-life that yearned for day. 
And though she ruled me always, I remember 
That once when I was thus and she still kept 
Leaping about the place and laughing, I 
Did almost chide her ; whereupon she knelt 
And putting her two hands into my breast 
Sang me a song. Are these tears in my eyes ? 
'Tis long since I have wept for anything. 
I thought that song forgotten out of mind. 

But the " rude thing ill-rhymed " comes back 
and haunts him, with the bitter contrast of the 
singer then and now. 

The words of the girl's love-song are in Italian, 
and at one time Rossetti thought of omitting 
them altogether. His brother, in writing of the 
year 1869, says : " On 26th August he wrote 
discussing the metre of his Italian song l La 
Belladonna ' (in the ' Last Confession '); to some 
laxities in which, as contrary to the scheme of 
Italian rhythm, I had started an objection. Soon 
afterwards he decided to cut out this song alto- 
gether ; but then again relented, and retained it. ' ' 

In the poem the dying patriot croons over the 
soft lilting notes, and sees again the sweet girl 
singer of those early days ; and the patient 
priest still waits for the confession. 
78 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

You see I cannot, Father ; I have tried, 

But cannot, as you see. These twenty times 

Beginning, I have come to the same point 

And stopped. Beyond, there are but broken words 

Which will not let you understand my tale. 

At last, however, the tale in all its tragedy is 
told, dropped out painfully, word by word, from 
the lips of the stricken lover. 

As his heart had rilled with passionate love, 
so hers had seemed to grow empty even of her 
childhood's feeling for him : he seemed power- 
less to win back even that early affection. So, 
at last, she had left him ; and he was thankful 
for the poor promise of one last interview : 

so I stood the day her empty heart 
Left her place empty in our home, while yet 
I knew not why she went nor where she went 
Nor how to reach her : so I stood the day 
When to my prayers at last one sight of her 
Was granted, and I looked on heaven made pale 
With scorn, and heard heaven mock me in that laugh. 

" That laugh " sounds through the poem, even 
as it sounded in the disordered brain of the dying 
man, with a haunting cadence of which one 
cannot miss the significance. 

The promised meeting took place upon the 
hill-side, and he learned that they met only to 
part — that his faithful, loving devotion raised 
in her heart no feelings but those of scorn and 
ridicule. 

His eyes, which have watched her from a 
child, read below the surface : he saw all that 

79 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

the change in her might come to mean ; he 
realized the depth to which she n ight sink, 
when once rid of his sheltering care. So came 
the end, inevitable in a nature of Southern 
passions such as his. He had not sought her 
empty-handed. 

I passed a village fair upon my road, 

And thought, being empty-handed, I would take 

Some little present : such might prove, I said, 

Either a pledge between us, or (God help me !) 

A parting gift. And there it was I bought 

The knife I spoke of, such as women wear. 

That day, three hours afterwards, I found 

For certain, it must be a parting gift. 

And, standing silent now at last, I looked 

Into her scornful face ; and heard the sea 

Still trying hard to din into my ears 

Some speech it knew which still might change her 

heart, 
If only it could make me understand. 
One moment thus. Another, and her face 
Seemed further off than the last line of sea, 
So that I thought, if now she were to speak 

I could not hear her. Then again I knew 
All, as we stood together on the sand 

At Iglio, in the first thin shade o' the hills. 

II Take it," I said, and held it out to her, 

While the hilt glanced within my trembling hold ; 
11 Take it and keep it for my sake," I said. 
Her neck unbent not, neither did her eyes 
Move, nor her foot left beating of the sand ; 
Only she put it by from her and laughed. 

It had been the sound of that laugh which had 
80 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

stung him to madness ; he had caught in it 
the echo of a worthless woman's laugh, heard 
at the village fair where he had bought the 
dagger ; it seemed to his frenzied brain the 
prophecy, in her own voice, of shame such as 
that woman's which might be hers in time to 
come. 

She had not left me long ; 
But all she might have changed to, or might change to 
(I know nought since — she never speaks a word — ) 
Seemed in that laugh. Have I not told you yet, 
Not told you all this time what happened, Father, 
When I had offered her the little knife, 
And bade her keep it for my sake that loved her, 
And she had laughed ? Have I not told you yet ? 
' ' Take it, " I said to her the second time, 
" Take it and keep it." And then came the fire 
That burnt my hand ; and then the fire was blood, 
And sea and sky were blood and fire, and all 
The day was one red blindness ; till it seemed, 
Within the whirling brain's eclipse, that she 
Or I or all things bled or burned to death. 
And then I found her laid against my feet 
And knew that I had stabbed her, and saw still 
Her look in falling. 

But it was not that look of hers that haunted 
him, even as Desdemona's last look haunted 
Othello ; it was the echo of the laugh that drove 
him to the deed. 

I shall hear her laugh 
Soon, when she shows the crimson steel to God. 

Father, you hear my speech and not her laugh ; 
But* God heard that. Will God remember all ? 

f 81 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

The poem is the most dramatic of Rossetti's 
works, and recalls Browning both in story and 
construction : as in the case of many of 
Browning's poems, the story is told by the hero, 
and it is on the elaborate workings of his mind 
that the interest centres throughout. The girl, 
the priest, even the figures at the fair, all stand 
out in clear relief as his thought follows each 
in turn ; and the action goes backward and 
forward, in his memory, in point of time, just 
as is so frequently the case in Browning's 
dramatic poems. 

1 ' The Last Confession ' ' was not published 
till the volume of " Poems " came out in 1870, 
but it was begun, at least, almost twenty years 
before. The story was original, as he said in a 
letter to his brother in 1849, when he expressed 
his intention of versifying it. 

It is probably to its Italian characters and 
setting that it owes the fact of being the first 
of its author's poems to have been translated 
into Italian. Of the year 1878 W. M. Rossetti 
writes : " In July Signor Luigi Gamberale sent 
over from Italy to the author his Italian version 
of the poem in question, entitled ' Un' Ultima 
Confessione.' It will be easily understood that 
this composition, which embodies a story partly 
(though only subordinately) related to the 
Italian revolutionary movements which preceded 
the attainment of national unity, appealed with 
especial force to an Italian heart and imagina- 
tion." 



82 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 



VI 

TO this period of Rossetti's work belongs 
his famous poem " Jenny," akin in 
subject to his picture " Found." All 
students should know it, but it does not lend 
itself to insertion in a work of the present kind. 
/We therefore turn to what is, probably, the best 
known among his ballads, that of ' ' Sister 
Helen " : once read, it can never be forgotten. 
In it we realize the truth of Professor Saints- 
bury 's words, " Rossetti is the magician, though 
his magic is not always easy to spell out. ' ' His 
metre may be at times irregular, and his rhymes 
faulty, but in such a work as " Sister Helen " 
the magician's wand is plain. 

The poem does not belong to the ordinary 
form of early ballad, such as " Eden Bridge " 
or ' ' Troy Town " ; it creates, in part at least, 
its own form, through which it pours forth in 
lurid streams the very spirit of mediaeval mys- 
ticism and witchcraft. The haunting sound of 
the semi-religious refrain ; the simple, sad figure 
of the little brother kept from play to aid his 
sister's ghastly work ; the despairing petitioners 
who kneel in turn beneath the tower, and go 
their way, defeated, one by one ; above all the 
character of Helen herself, triumphant in her 
revenge, pitiless and, at the same time, hopeless 
— go to make such a whole as English ballad 
poetry has rarely surpassed. 

The scene is laid in Scotland, and deals with 

83 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

the old superstition of taking your enemy's 
life by melting his waxen image before the 
fire. 

The opening stanzas, in which the story is 
made clear, were not part of the original poem. 
In speaking of the year 1869, W. M. Rossetti 
writes : " He . . . referred to his having 
added an opening stanza to ' Sister Helen,' for 
clearness sake " ; and probably the last letter 
he ever wrote, on March 5, 1882 — he died on 
the 9th of the following month — to his friend 
and biographer, Mr. Joseph Knight, relates to 
further additions to the poem : " In i Sister 
Helen ' (which, I remember, you always liked) 
there is an addition which (though it sounds 
alarming at first) has quite secured Watts 's 
suffrage. ' ' The introduction of Keith of Ewern's 
newly wedded bride among the suppliants for 
his life was evidently the change to which he 
referred, as the verses relating to her do not 
occur in the edition of 1870, nor does the verse 
which tells of Keith's sickening : 

(Three days ago, on his marriage-morn.) 

We quote from the later edition : 

' ' Why did you melt your waxen man, 
Sister Helen ? 
To-day is the third since you began." 
' ' The time was long, yet the time ran, 
Little brother." 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 
Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven !) 
84 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

11 But if you have done your work aright, 

Sister Helen, 
You'll let me play, for you said I might." 
" Be very still in your play to-night, 

Little brother." 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 
Third night, to-night, between Hell and Heaven !) 

" You said it must melt ere vesper-bell, 
Sister Helen ; 
If now it be molten, all is well." 
" Even so, — nay, peace ! you cannot tell, 
Little brother." 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 
Oh what is this between Hell and Heaven ?) 

" Oh, the waxen knave was plump to-day, 
Sister Helen ; 

How like dead folk he has dropped away ! " 

11 Nay now, of the dead what can you say, 
Little brother ? " 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 

What of the dead, between Hell and Heaven ?) 

" See, see, the sunken pile of wood, 

Sister Helen, 
Shines through the thinned wax red as blood ! " 
" Nay now, when looked you yet on blood, 

Little brother ? " 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 
How pale she is, between Hell and Heaven !) 

Then the sister, worn out with her ghastly 
work, sinks to rest upon the ground ; and the 
faithful little brother climbs the balcony and 

85 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

becomes a veritable Sister Ann, to report the 
approach of all who seek the tower. 

But it is Sister Helen herself who is the first to 
catch the sound of horsemen in the distance, 

" Three horsemen that ride terribly," 

and one outrides the other two, and gains the 
tower alone. 

" Oh ! it's Keith of Eastholm rides so fast, 

Sister Helen, 
For I know the white mane on the blast." 
" The hour has come, has come at last, 

Little brother ! " 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 
Her hour at last, between Hell and Heaven !) 

" The wind is loud, but I hear him cry, 

Sister Helen, 
That Keith of Ewern's like to die." 
" And he and thou, and thou and I, 

Little brother." 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 
And they and we, between Hell and Heaven !) 

" Three days ago, on his marriage-morn, 

Sister Helen, 
He sickened, and lies since then forlorn." 
" For bridegroom's side is the bride a thorn, 

Little brother ? " 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 
Cold bridal cheer, between Hell and Heaven !) 

" Three days and nights he has lain abed, 

Sister Helen, 
And he prays in torment to be dead." 
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ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

' ' The thing may chance, if he have prayed, 
Little brother ! " 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 
If he have prayed, between Hell and Heaven !) 

" But he has not ceased to cry to-day, 

Sister Helen, 
That you should take your curse away." 
1 ' My prayer was heard, — he need but pray, 

Little brother ! " 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 
Shall God not hear, between Hell and Heaven !) 

" But he says, till you take back your ban, 

Sister Helen, 
His soul would pass, yet never can." 
" Nay then, shall I slay a living man, 

Little brother ? " 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 
A living soul, between Hell and Heaven !) 

" But he calls for ever on your name, 
Sister Helen, 
And says that he melts before a flame." 
" My heart for his pleasure fared the same, 
Little brother." 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 
Fire at the heart, between Hell and Heaven 1) 

Then comes the second brother, Keith of 
Westholm, with his " white plume on the 
blast " : he tells the same awful tale and prays 
the same prayer, only to be met by the pitiless 
refrain, 

Love turned to hate, between Hell and Heaven ! 

87 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

And now the pathetic figure of the Chief him- 
self, Keith of Keith, kneels below the balcony, 
and his broken voice begs for his son's pardon, 
that at last the soul may depart in peace. 

" Oh, it's Keith of Keith now that rides fast, 

Sister Helen, 
For I know the white hair on the blast." 
1 ' The short, short hour will soon be past, 

Little brother ! " 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 
Will soon be past, between Hell and Heaven !) 

1 ' He looks at me and he tries to speak, 
Sister Helen, 

But oh ! his voice is sad and weak ! " 

' ' What here should the mighty Baron seek, 
Little brother ? " 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 

Is this the end, between Hell and Heaven ?) 

' ' Oh his son still cries, if you forgive, 
Sister Helen, 

The body dies but the soul shall live." 

' ' Fire shall forgive me as I forgive, 

Little brother ! " 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 

As she forgives, between Hell and Heaven !) 

1 ' Oh, he prays you, as his heart would rive, 

Sister Helen, 
To save his dear son's soul alive." 
" Fire cannot slay it, it shall thrive, 

Little brother ! " 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 
Alas, alas, between Hell and Heaven !) 
88 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

" He cries to you, kneeling in the road, 

Sister Helen, 
To go with him for the love of God ! " 
11 The way is long to his son's abode, 

Little brother." 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 
The way is long, between Hell and Heaven !) 

Then, when the father's prayer is refused, 
last of all comes Helen's own supplanter, the 
three days' bride, the golden-haired Lady of 
Ewern ; and Helen's awful triumph is com- 
plete. 

" Pale, pale her cheeks, that in pride did glow, 

Sister Helen, 
'Neath the bridal-wreath three days ago." 
" One morn for pride and three days for woe, 

Little brother ! " 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 
Three days, three nights, between Hell and Heaven 1) 

1 ' Her clasped hands stretch from her bending head, 

Sister Helen ; 
With the loud wind's wail her sobs are wed." 
" What wedding-strains hath her bridal -bed, 
Little brother ? " 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 
What strain but death's, between Hell and Heaven !) 

" She may not speak, she sinks in a swoon, 

Sister Helen, 
She lifts her lips and gasps on the moon." 
" Oh ! might I but hear her soul's blithe tune, 
Little brother ! " 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 
Her woe's dumb cry, between Hell and Heaven !) 

89 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

But for her, least of all, has Helen no 
mercy ; so the brothers lift her gently from 
the snow, and the sad cortege turns and goes 
back whence it came, leaving the black deed to 
its consummation. 

And, in the presence of the two actors with 
which the poem opened, so it now closes : 

" See, see, the wax has dropped from its place, 

Sister Helen, 
And the flames are winning up apace ! " 
' ' Yet here they burn but for a space, 

Little brother ! " 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 
Here for a space, between Hell and Heaven !) 

"Ah! what white thing at the door has cross'd, 
Sister Helen ? 

Ah ! what is this that sighs in the frost ? " 

" A soul that's lost as mine is lost, 

Little brother ! " 
(0 Mother, Mary Mother, 

Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven !) 

The poem stands alone among English ballads, 
unclassed and unclassable ; the creation of a 
genius which knew no school ; breathing in 
every sombre picture, in every haunting signi- 
ficant refrain, the weird wild spirit of mediaeval 
superstition and revenge. Perhaps one of the 
minor details in Buchanan's attack on Rossetti 
in the " Contemporary Review " in 1871, which 
shows most plainly his absolute failure to grasp 
the real meaning and construction of the 
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ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

" Poems," is that he turns to ridicule the 
refrain in " Sister Helen " as a piece of mere 
wordy monotony. To anyone who studies and 
understands the poem, there can be nothing in 
it more striking than the way in which those 
final lines of " Greek Chorus" sum up the 
awful significance of each verse in turn, till 
they end in the inevitable wail of despair of 
the final line : 

Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven ! 



VII 

From the tragic story of Helen's love we 
turn to a love-story also tragic in its kind, that 
of the poet himself. About the year 1850 
Rossetti first met the lady destined to become 
his wife, Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal. She 
was the daughter of Charles Siddal, a cutler of 
Sheffield, and when Rossetti first made her 
acquaintance she was employed in London as a 
milliner's assistant. The pure calm beauty of 
her face, in its wonderful setting of copper- 
coloured hair, first attracted him ; and that 
beauty is known to all by the many portraits 
he has left of her in his pictures, of which the 
best known perhaps is the " Beata Beatrix," 
now in the Tate Gallery. She became at 
first his model, and shortly his pupil, for she 
was herself an artist of no mean order ; and 
Rossetti, who thought highly of her work, 
always encouraged her with the generous appre- 

91 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

ciation he was so ready to bestow on fellow 
artists. Their love-story is known to all, their 
unity of interests, and their devotion, darkened 
always by the shadow of consumption, which 
threatened her life throughout the whole of 
their long engagement. Rossetti was a poor 
man, and health and finance alike combined 
against their union, which did not take place 
till ten years after their first meeting : those 
years were filled with mixed sunshine and 
shadows, as many of the references to Miss 
Siddall in his letters show. 

On August 25, 1853, he wrote to Mr. Madox 
Brown, after Miss Siddal had been engaged on 
a water-colour portrait of Tennyson : " Lizzy 
has made a perfect wonder of her portrait, which 
is nearly done, and which I think we shall send 
to the Winter Exhibition. She has been very 
ill, though, lately." On March 30, 1854, he 
wrote to the same friend : " Lizzy has been 
very unwell lately. I have introduced her to 
the Howitts, and we have spent several even- 
ings there. They are quite fond of her, and 
most delighted with her productions. I have 
also brought her and my sister Christina 
together, as our family are now in London 
again. 

"The Howitts insisted on Lizzy's seeing a 
Dr. Wilkinson [an eminent homceopathist of the 
day], a friend of theirs, and I believe an eminent 
man. He finds that the poor dear has con- 
tracted a curvature of the spine, and says she 
ought not to paint at present " ; with charac- 
92 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

teristic disregard of health, he added, " but 
this, of course, she must.'' 

On January 23, 1855, in a letter to William 
Allingham he mentioned a friend of theirs being 
ordered to Rome for her health ; and added, 
" I wish there were any Rome for my good 
pupil, whose life might matter a little. She 
bears the cold weather, however, on the whole, 
better than I looked for, and of course progresses 
always as an artist. She is now doing two 
lovely water-colours (from * We are Seven' and 
' La Belle Dame sans merci ') — having found 
herself always thrown back for lack of health 
and wealth in the attempts she had made to 
begin a picture." " Thrown back for lack 
of health and wealth ' ' sums up the darker side 
of the lives of these gifted lovers. 

Ruskin's recognition of Miss Siddal's powers 
was a great pleasure to Rossetti, who wrote to 
Allingham a few months after the last letter : 
" About a week ago Ruskin saw and bought 
on the spot every scrap of designs hitherto 
produced by Miss Siddal. He declared that 
they were far better than mine, or almost than 
anyone's, and seemed quite wild with delight 
at getting them. He asked me to name a price 
for them, after asking and hearing that they 
were for sale ; and I, of course, considering 
the immense advantage of getting them into 
his hands, named a very low price, £25, 
which he declared to be too low even for a 
low price, and increased to £30. He is going 
to have them splendidly mounted and bound 

93 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

together in gold ; and no doubt this will be a 
real opening for her, as it is already a great 
assistance and encouragement." It is charac- 
teristic of the eagerness of his nature, and the 
place which Art always held with him, that his 
anxiety about Miss Siddal's health seemed 
subordinate to his longing for her artistic recog- 
nition. His whole-hearted appreciation of her 
work, and the picture of their life together, 
painting side by side, cannot but remind us of 
two of their most gifted contemporaries to 
whom Rossetti makes a charmingly quaint 
allusion in another of his letters to Allingham, 
dated 1856 : " The Brownings are long gone 
back now, and with them one of my delights — 
an evening resort where I never felt unhappy. 
How large a part of the real world, I wonder, 
are those two small people ? — taking meanwhile 
so little room in any railway carriage, and 
hardly needing a double bed at the inn." 

Rossetti writes constantly of Miss Siddal to 
his family and his friends, usually as Lizzie or 
Liz, sometimes by the playful pet name Guggum, 
and that at times abbreviated to G. ; but the 
shadow of her delicacy, which shortened their 
married life, darkened the whole of their long 
engagement. 

In the course of i860 the wedding was at 
length fixed, but even then it had to be twice 
postponed, owing to the illness of the bride. 
They were married on May 23 of that year, in 
St. Clement's Church, Hastings, and the same 
day Rossetti wrote to Mad ox Brown, ' ' All hail 
94 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

from Lizzie and myself, just back from church." 
They made a tour in France and Belgium, and 
then returned to the lodgings in Blackfriars, 
which had been prepared for the coming of the 
bride. Their married life ran out its brief and 
tragic course within two years. A dead baby 
was born in March 1861, and the mother's health 
failed rapidly. The form of consumption from 
which she suffered brought with it violent pain, 
and to relieve this she had recourse to laudanum. 
She died from an overdose of the drug in 
February 1862, after an engagement of nearly 
ten years and a married life of less than 
two. 

The tragic scene over her dead body is known 
to all. Rossetti's passion of grief was added 
to by the feelings of remorse inevitable in such 
a nature as his. He came to her, as she lay 
in her coffin, bringing in his hand the little 
volume into which, at her bidding, he had 
copied his poems. They were hers, he said, 
they had been written for her, and she must 
take them with her ; and he laid the book 
beside the beautiful face he had so often painted, 
and they were buried together. 

Some of these poems, as already mentioned, 
had been published in magazines, but of many 
no second copy existed ; and for seven years 
they lay in the grave in Highgate Cemetery, 
while Rossetti seemed to give up writing alto- 
gether and to devote himself exclusively to 
painting. Much of his best artistic work 
belongs to these years : of his famous picture, 

95 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

the " Beata Beatrix," W. M. Rossetti writes : 
" It represents Beatrice in a semi-supernatural 
trance, ominous and symbolic of death, but not 
in any sense dead ; and was painted some while 
after the death of my brother's wife, probably 
beginning in 1863, with portraiture so faith- 
fully reminiscent that one might almost say 
she sat, in spirit and to the mind's eye, for the 
face." 

It is far more difficult to fix the dates of 
Rossetti 's poems than of his pictures ; and the 
fact that he frequently remodelled them, changed 
some stanzas and added others dealing with 
later events, often prevents the possibility of 
fixing their dates by internal evidence. " The 
Portrait," for instance, contains obvious allu- 
sions to the memory of his wife, but the original 
poem was one of those buried with her. We 
insert it in full. 

This is her picture as she was : 

It seems a thing to wonder on, 
As though mine image in the glass 

Should tarry when myself am gone. 
I gaze until she seems to stir, — 
Until mine eyes almost aver 

That now, even now, the sweet lips part 
To breathe the words of the sweet heart: 
And yet the earth is over her. 

Alas ! even such the thin-drawn ray 

That makes the prison-depths more rude, 
The drip of water night and day 
Giving a tongue to solitude. 
96 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Yet only this, of love's whole prize, 
Remains ; save what in mournful guise 
Takes counsel with my soul alone, — 
Save what is secret and unknown, 
Below the earth, above the skies. 

In painting her I shrined her face 

'Mid mystic trees, where light falls in 
Hardly at all ; a covert place 

Where you might think to find a din 
Of doubtful talk, and a live flame 
Wandering, and many a shape whose name 
Not itself knoweth, and old dew, 
And your own footsteps meeting you, 
And all things going as they came. 

A deep dim wood ; and there she stands 

As in that wood that day : for so 
Was the still movement of her hands 

And such the pure line's gracious flow. 
And passing fair the type must seem, 
Unknown the presence and the dream. 
'Tis she : though of herself, alas ! 
Less than her shadow on the grass 
Or than her image in the stream. 

That day we met there, I and she 

One with the other all alone ; 
And we were blithe, yet memory 

Saddens those hours, as when the moon 
Looks upon daylight. And with her 
I stooped to drink the spring-water, 

Athirst where other waters sprang : 
And where the echo is, she sang, — 
My soul another echo there. 

g 97 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

But when that hour my soul won strength 

For words whose silence wastes and kills, 
Dull raindrops smote us, and at length 
Thundered the heat within the hills. 
That eve I spoke those words again 
Beside the pelted window-pane ; 

And there she hearkened what I said, 
With under-glances that surveyed 
The empty pastures blind with rain. 

Next day the memories of these things, 

Like leaves through which a bird has flown, 
Still vibrated with Love's warm wings ; 

Till I must make them all my own 
And paint this picture. So, 'twixt ease 
Of talk and sweet long silences, 

She stood among the plants in bloom 
At windows of a summer room, 
To feign the shadow of the trees. 

And as I wrought, while all above 
And all around was fragrant air, 
In the sick burthen of my love 

It seemed each sun-thrilled blossom there 
Beat like a heart among the leaves. 
O heart that never beats nor heaves, 
In that one darkness lying still, 
What now to thee my love's great will 
Or the fine web the sunshine weaves ? 

For now doth daylight disavow 

Those days — nought left to see or hear. 

Only in solemn whispers now 

At night-time these things reach mine ear ; 
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ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

When the leaf -shadows at a breath 
Shrink in the road, and all the heath, 

Forest and water, far and wide, 

In limpid starlight glorified, 
Lie like the mystery of death. 

Last night at last I could have slept, 

And yet delayed my sleep till dawn, 
Still wandering. Then it was I wept : 

For unawares I came upon 
Those glades where once she walked with me : 
And as I stood there suddenly, 

All wan with traversing the night, 
Upon the desolate verge of light 
Yearned loud the iron-bosomed sea. 

Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears 

The beating heart of Love's own breast, 
Where round the secret of all spheres 
All angels lay their wings to rest, — 
How shall my soul stand rapt and awed, 
When, by the new birth borne abroad 
Throughout the music of the suns, 
It enters in her soul at once 
And knows the silence there for God ! 

Here with her face doth memory sit 

Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline, 
Till other eyes shall look from it, 

Eyes of the spirit's Palestine, 
Even than the old gaze tenderer : 
While hopes and aims long lost with her 
Stand round her image side by side, 
Like tombs of pilgrims that have died 
About the Holy Sepulchre. 

99 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

One sees in this poem with what a master- 
hand Rossetti could fit his garland woven once 
for an imaginary head, to one which was not 
imaginary. The lines are full of his wife's 
memory, and of their life together. Mr. Knight 
has cleverly suggested the identity of the scene 
touched on in verse vi with that of a stormy 
afternoon in April 1854, when Rossetti and 
Miss Siddal sheltered together from the rain in 
a farmhouse near Hastings, and carved their 
monograms upon the window panel. In verse 
iv, lines 3 and 4 specially reproduce the charm 
of Miss Siddal's beauty, and they could only 
have been penned by an artist ; while in the 
last verse but one he seems to return for comfort 
to his own creation of earlier days, and more 
than one echo comes to us from the Heaven of 
the " Blessed Damozel." 

VIII 

SOON after his wife's death Rossetti left 
the house in Blackfriars, and removed, 
after a short interval, to No. 16 Cheyne 
Walk, with which his memory will be always 
associated. For a little while he shared the 
house with his brother, Swinburne, and George 
Meredith, but this arrangement did not last 
long. Meredith left first, then Swinburne ; 
W. M. Rossetti stayed on until his marriage in 

1874. 

Swinburne's acquaintance Rossetti had made 
in Oxford in 1857, while he was painting the 
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ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

frescoes there for the " Union " which were to 
illustrate scenes from the " Morte d' Arthur." 
Many of his friendships dated from that time, 
when Morris, Burne-Jones, and Val Prinsep 
were among his fellow enthusiasts ; and the 
fact that the walls of the ' ' Union ' ' were not fit 
for the work, being new and unprepared, and 
that the priceless pictures — painted for love, 
not money — peeled away and are now unrecog- 
nizable, is another of the many disappointing 
little incidents in Rossetti's life. 

Besides the house in Cheyne Walk he shared 
Kelmscott Manor, near Lechlade, for some time 
as a country residence with William Morris, 
and he also paid visits among his friends in 
Scotland and elsewhere. There have been so 
many descriptions given of 16 Cheyne Walk, 
its artistic but gloomily furnished chambers, 
and its oddly stocked garden, that one more 
seems unnecessary. It is in those surroundings 
that his figure has grown to be most familiar. 
The house was old and handsome, and Rossetti 
filled it with priceless treasures in furniture, 
pottery, and bronzes. There he would sit among 
his friends, at the dinners when he made a most 
genial host, surrounded by wonders of Japanese 
and Chinese art, old oak, blue china, and fine 
old metalwork of many kinds. And later on, 
in the studio, he would charm the same friends 
with that vivid personal magnetism of which 
he was possessed, and which drew men to lavish 
on him deep and ungrudging love. The beauty 
of his voice and the power of his recitation were 

IOI 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

among his noted personal gifts, and he would 
lie full length on a sofa in his studio, surrounded 
by his pictures and his friends, and repeat his 
own ballads, or those of other poets, giving 
always generous appreciation to the work of 
his fellow bards. 

A fine trait in his character was his recog- 
nition of good work by others, and in this he 
always showed a ready insight. The story of 
his discovery in i860 of FitzGerald's hitherto 
neglected masterpiece " Omar Khayyam " is 
well known ; we give it in Swinburne's words : 
" Two friends of Rossetti 's— Mr. Whitley Stokes 
and Mr. Ormsby — told him (he told me) of this 
wonderful little pamphlet for sale on a stall in 
St. Martin's Lane, to which Mr. Quaritch, find- 
ing that the British public unanimously declined 
to give a shilling for it, had relegated it to be 
disposed of for a penny. Having read it, 
Rossetti and I invested upwards of sixpence 
apiece — or possibly threepence, I would not 
wish to exaggerate our extravagance — in copies 
at that not exorbitant price. Next day we 
thought we might get some more for presents 
among our friends, but the man at the stall 
asked twopence ! Rossetti expostulated with 
him in terms of such humorously indignant 
remonstrance as none but he could ever have 
commanded. We took a few, and left him. In 
a week or two, if I am not much mistaken, the 
remaining copies were sold at a guinea ; I have 
since — as I dare say you have — seen copies 
offered for still more absurd prices. I kept my 
102 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

pennyworth (the tidiest copy of the lot), and 
have it still." 

Rossetti loved pets, and strange beasts dwelt 
in that shady garden on the Chelsea Embank- 
ment. There were two kangaroos, a peacock 
which screeched itself to liberty through the 
complaints of the neighbours, a beautiful fallow 
deer, two wandering and mischievous arma- 
dillos, and a snarling, ill-tempered racoon whom 
Rossetti would show off, holding him by the 
scruff of the neck and asking, " Does it not 
look like a devil ? " Among these queer 
creatures the poet would wander contentedly, 
exhibiting them to his friends and expatiating 
on their various beauties. Of the zebu, a wild 
little fellow about the size of a small Shetland 
pony, the only tale is told in which the master 
fared ill among his beasts : according to 
Whistler, the zebu once caused Rossetti to run, 
and might have done him serious harm had not 
its efforts been luckily hampered by the tree to 
which it had been tethered, and which it had 
uprooted in its frantic efforts to attack its 
master. Another of his pets was the godly 
minded parrot who sat beside him one Sunday 
morning while the bells of St. Luke's Church 
rang for service, and suddenly adjured his 
master, " You ought to be in church now ! " 

Many of his best-known pictures, both in oil 
and water-colour, date from Rossetti 's residence 
in Cheyne Walk : he would keep pictures on 
hand for years, just as he did with many of his 
poems, and would touch and retouch them in 

103 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

the same way ; he would also work over and 
over again at the same subject, as in the case 
of his pictures on ' ' Mary Magdalene at the 
door of Simon the Pharisee " and " Found," 
of which he planned the subject in the year 
1853, and at which he was still working shortly 
before his death. One of the subjects on which 
he both painted and wrote was " Lilith," the 
snake-like woman, the legendary first wife of 
Adam. The rather uncanny mysticism of the 
legend was just such as would appeal to him, 
but there is little connexion between Lilith's 
figure in his two poems and the golden-haired 
lady whom he painted both in oil and water- 
colour. In the volume of 1870, among the 
Sonnets for Pictures, appeared that entitled 
" Lilith " : it reappeared in the later editions 
of his works under the name " Body's Beauty," 
No. LXXVIII in " The House of Life." There 
is only one change in the later form, that of 
" web " instead of " net " in line 6, an obvious 
improvement both in sense and sound. 

Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told 

(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve) 

That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive, 

And still she sits, young while the earth is old, 
And, subtly of herself contemplative, 
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave, 

Till heart and body and life are in its hold. 

The rose and poppy are her flowers ; for where 
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent 
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare ? 
104 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Lo ! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went 
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck 
bent 
And round his heart one strangling golden hair. 

Lilith 's snake-like form seems to coil in every 
line of the sonnet, and leaves one with almost 
a feeling of suffocation at the imagery of the 
last line. 

The poem " Eden Bower," written in early 
ballad form, with a simple refrain after the first 
line of each verse, gives the whole legend with 
the minute care for detail beloved by the Pre- 
Raphaelite Brotherhood. 

It was Lilith the wife of Adam : 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
Not a drop of her blood was human, 
But she was made like a soft sweet woman. 

Lilith stood on the skirts of Eden ; 

(Alas the hour !) 
She was the first that thence was driven ; 
With her was hell and with Eve was heaven. 

In the ear of the snake said Lilith : 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
1 * To thee I come when the rest is over ; 
A snake was I when thou wast my lover. 

1 ' I was the fairest snake in Eden. 

(Alas the hour !) 
By the earth's will, new form and feature 
Made me a wife for the earth's new creature." 

105 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Thus she cries to her old lover, as she comes 
back from the side of Adam whom she has 
lost : she looks again on their joys together in 
Eden ; and she calls on the mighty serpent, 
"the King-snake of Eden," to help her in 
avenging herself for all she has forfeited. 

" Help, sweet Snake, sweet lover of Lilith ! 

(Alas the hour /) 
And let God learn how I loved and hated 
Man in the image of God created. 

"Help me once against Eve and Adam ! 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
Help me once for this one endeavour, 
And then my love shall be thine for ever ! 

" Strong is God, the fell foe of Lilith : 

(A las the hour !) 
Nought in heaven or earth may affright Him ; 
But join thou with me and we will smite Him. 

1 ' Strong is God, the great God of Eden : 

{Sing Eden Bower !) 
Over all He made He hath power ; 
But lend me thou thy shape for an hour ! 

" Lend thy shape for the hate of Adam ! 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
That he may wail my joy that forsook him, 
And curse the day when the bride-sleep took him." 

Then she unfolds her evil plan : she makes the 
snake creep close to her, and listen 

" And learn what deed remains for our doing. 
106 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

" Thou didst hear when God said to Adam : 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
1 Of all this wealth I have made thee warden ; 
Thou'rt free to eat of the trees of the garden : 

" ' Only of one tree eat not in Eden ; 

(Alas the hour !) 
All save one I give to thy free will, 
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.' 

" my love, come nearer to Lilith ! 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
In thy sweet folds bind me and bend me, 
And let me feel the shape thou shalt lend me. 

" In thy shape I'll go back to Eden ; 

(A las the hour !) 
In these coils that Tree will I grapple, 
And stretch this crowned head forth by the apple." 

Then Lilith foretells the scenes in Paradise : 
Eve's temptation, her tempting of Adam, and 
their fall ; God's visit to the garden in the 
evening ; their vain excuses, and their expul- 
sion from the paradise into which, through them, 
sin has now entered. There is something akin 
to the grand simplicity of the Bible itself in the 
lines which foretell the Fall of Man. Lilith 
speaks to Eve : 

" Nay, but on that great day in Eden, 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
By the help that in this wise Tree is, 
God knows well ye shall be as He is." 

107 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

" Then Eve shall eat and give unto Adam ; 

(Alas the hour !) 
And then they both shall know they are naked, 
And their hearts ache as my heart hath ached. 

" Ay, let them hide 'mid the trees of Eden, 
(Sing Eden Bower !) 
As in the cool of the day in the garden 
God shall walk without pity or pardon. 

" Hear, thou Eve, the man's heart in Adam ! 

(Alas the hour !) 
Of his brave words hark to the bravest : — 
' This the woman gave that thou gavest.' 

" Hear Eve speak, yea list to her, Lilith ! 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
Feast thine heart with words that shall sate it — 
1 This the serpent gave and I ate it.' 

" proud Eve, cling close to thine Adam, 

(A las the hour !) 
Driven forth as the beasts of his naming 
By the sword that for ever is flaming." 

So Lilith, the terrible snake-woman, foretells 
the Fall of Man ; and then, from the Bible 
narrative, the ballad passes to a scene which is 
purely imaginary, that of her reunion with the 
serpent after her evil purpose has been accom- 
plished. Rossetti gives every detail of the 
picture, with that perfection of touch which 
is his alike on page or canvas. Nothing could 
be more dramatic than the horrible triumph 
that rings in their cries over Eden and her fallen 
inmates. 
108 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

" On that day on the skirts of Eden, 

(Alas the hour !) 
In thy shape shall I glide back to thee, 
And in my shape for an instant view thee. 

" But when thou'rt thou and Lilith is Lilith, 
(Sing Eden Bower !) 
In what bliss past hearing and seeing 
Shall each one drink of the other's being ! 

11 With cries of ' Eve ! ' and ' Eden ! ' and ' Adam ! ' 

(Alas the hour !) 
How shall we mingle our love's caresses, 
I in thy coils, and thou in my tresses ? 

" With those names, ye echoes of Eden, 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
Fire shall cry from my heart that burneth, — 
' Dust he is and to dust returneth ! ' " 



Then again the scene reverts to the Bible 
narrative, and each detail is closely followed. 
Once more is seen " the garden planted east- 
ward in Eden," but the river no longer waters 
the garden, " thorns also and thistles shall it 
bring forth," and the east of the garden is 
now guarded by the " flaming sword which 
turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of 
life." 

" In the planted garden eastward in Eden, 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
Where the river goes forth to water the garden, 
The springs shall dry and the soil shall harden. 

109 



RT)SSETTI & HIS POETRY 

" Yea, where the bride-sleep fell upon Adam, 

(A las the hour !) 
None shall hear when the storm-wind whistles 
Through roses choked among thorns and thistles. 

" Yea, beside the east-gate of Eden, 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
Where God joined them and none might sever, 
The sword turns this way and that for ever. 

" What of Adam cast out of Eden ? 

(Alas the hour !) 
Lo ! with care like a shadow shaken, 
He tills the hard earth whence he was taken. 

" What of Eve too, cast out of Eden ? 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
Nay, but she, the bride of God's giving, 
Must yet be mother of all men living." 

And the ballad ends with a prophecy of the 
birth of Cain and Abel, and of the terrible part 
which sin, now born into the world, is to play 
in their intercourse together. 

" The first is Cain and the second Abel : 

(Sing Eden Bower !) 
The soul of one shall be made thy brother, 
And thy tongue shall lap the blood of the other." 

(Alas the hour !) 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 



IX 

ROSSETTI was not five-and-thirty when 
his short married life came to an end ; 
the early years in the Chelsea house 
were those of his prime, although few poets 
produced such flawless work at so early an age 
as he had done. All know, from his many 
portraits, his appearance at this time — the 
great forehead and strongly formed brows, the 
deep-set grey eyes, the dark curly hair and short 
beard, and the thick moustache which shaded 
the mouth. His figure, slender in youth, was 
at this time inclining to stoutness, much to his 
own annoyance, but in later years ill-health 
removed any such tendency : in height he 
was just under 5 ft. 8 in. His dress was that 
of the type to which he belonged, and his 
portraits generally show him clad in a large 
loose-fitting coat, suitable for work in a studio. 
It was perhaps unfortunate for him that, much 
to his own regret, he was never able to become 
a smoker ; tobacco might have done something 
to soothe him in the inevitable worries and 
anxieties of life, which went hardly with such 
a temperament as his. He was no newspaper 
reader, and took no part and little interest in 
contemporary politics, but he was full of interest 
and generous sympathy for all workers in his 
own line. He was an enthusiastic though 
limited reader as regards poets of the past, and 
his special favourites among them appear in 

in 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

many of his letters. " You can never say too 
much about Coleridge for me," he writes to 
Mr. Hall Caine, " for I worship him on the 
right side of idolatry." To the same friend he 
said, "The three greatest imaginations are 
Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Shelley." Keats 
he read from boyhood, and of him he wrote that 
" he was, among all his contemporaries who 
established their names, the one true heir of 
Shakespeare." And again he writes of him to 
Mr. Hall Caine : " Keats hardly died so much 
too early — not at all if there had been any 
danger of his taking to the modern habit event- 
ually — treating material as product, and shoot- 
ing it all out as it comes. Of course, however, 
he wouldn't ; he was getting always choicer and 
simpler, and my favourite piece in his work is 
' La Belle Dame sans Merci ' — I suppose about 
his last." 

Rossetti has left records of his admiration for 
Blake too, and for the ill-fated Chatterton whose 
poems he had read as a boy. On the other 
hand, he never fully appreciated Wordsworth, 
whose mind and methods were too far removed 
from his own to attract him. Mr. Hall Caine 
declares that Rossetti frequently said to him, 
" I grudge Wordsworth every vote he gets " ; 
and that he wrote : " As to Wordsworth, no 
one regards the great Ode with more special 
and unique homage than I do, as a thing abso- 
lutely alone of its kind among all greatest things. 
I cannot say that anything else of his with which 
I have ever been familiar (and I suffer from long 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

disuse of all familiarity with him) seems at all 
on a level with this. ' ' 

The poets of his own day, Tennyson, Brown- 
ing, Swinburne and the rest, were his friends, 
and to their work he gave generous and un- 
grudging admiration. From Browning 's poems, 
as we have noted, he took many subjects for 
pictures, and it was in Browning's London house 
that his well-known sketch was taken of Tenny- 
son reading aloud his own poem " Maud." 
The sketch is reproduced in Dunn's " Recollec- 
tions of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," with the 
comment, " Whoever possesses the little sketch 
ought to prize it very highly." It is sad to 
follow the fate of the little sketch, which con- 
nects three such great names in poetry, and to 
mark that the sense in which Mr. Dunn's words 
came true was not by any means that which 
he anticipated. Rossetti gave the original to 
Browning, and the " Athenaeum " for May 10, 
1913, contains the following entry, under the 
heading "The Browning Sale": " D. G. 
Rossetti, Pen-and-ink portrait of Tennyson 
reading * Maud,' Sept. 27, 1855, £225." 

So the years passed on at Cheyne Walk, and 
Rossetti spent them in hard work and inter- 
course with his friends. These friends varied 
at different periods of his life : his friendships 
were deep and warm, but not always lasting. 
From both Browning and Ruskin he was 
estranged in later years ; his letters to Ailing- 
ham came to a somewhat abrupt end, and this 
was the case with others among his correspon- 
h 113 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

dents. He was a man of moods ; of strong 
emotions and limited interests and outlook, 
intensely sensitive to misconception and intole- 
rant of all with whom he disagreed. But both 
his feelings and his friends had united during 
the last few years in urging him to one important 
act, that of the recovery of his buried volume 
of poems. Leave was accordingly obtained 
from the Home Secretary, Mr. Bruce, to open 
the coffin of Elizabeth Rossetti ; the poet spent 
a sorrowful and solemn night while the cere- 
mony was carried out, and the face he had so 
often painted was once more exposed to view, 
still beautiful as in life. After treatment by 
an expert, the volume was placed in Rossetti's 
hands, and by him prepared for publication with 
considerable changes and additions. 

His publisher, to the end of his life, was Mr. 
F. S. Ellis, in 1870 of King Street, Covent 
Garden, and later of New Bond Street ; it is 
pleasant to recall the testimony Mr. W. M. 
Rossetti bears as to their relations: " My 
brother had, from first to last, the utmost reason 
for satisfaction in having come to terms with 
Mr. Ellis, who acted with consistent liberality 
and friendly zeal, and who relieved him from 
all trouble in the matter more onerous than that 
of receiving cheques for author's royalty on 
sales, at punctual intervals." 

One memorable feature in Rossetti's life was 
his warm family affection, and the way that 
loving sympathy and appreciation from his 
mother and his gifted brother and sister cheered 
114 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

him in every phase of his career, and were round 
him to the end. His father had died in 1854, 
but to the end of his life he and his son had 
been on affectionate terms of intimacy. The 
warm affection existing between the different 
generations of the family is illustrated in a 
letter of Gabriele Rossetti's to his son, written 
a few months before his death : "We shall 
return to London on the 25th of March, and 
we return for ever. I trust to find in good health 
you, my dearest son, and your brother and your 
sister Maria. And you will rejoice in again 
seeing dear Christina, and your aged father, 
who will soon go underground with beloved 
Polidori. I learned with pleasure that you and 
William and Maria all assisted at his last 
moments. Dearest father-in-law and friend, 
how much I love you ! " 

The letter ends : " Be heedful of your pro- 
fession, dearly beloved son, and let the public 
see what you are capable of. 

' ' Your loving father, 

"GABRIELE ROSSETTI" 

It was of his son's pictures the father was 
thinking when he wrote the last words, but 
he would have been proud had he lived to see 
the welcome accorded by the ' * public ' ' to his 
son's first volume of poems. 

The book appeared in the end of April 1870, 
and was called simply ' ' Poems " : it was 
dedicated to his brother. Its success was so 
immediate that on May 4 Rossetti wrote to his 

"5 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

mother : " Dear Old Darling of 70, — You will 
be glad to hear that the first edition is almost 
exhausted, and that Ellis is going to press with 
the second thousand. It will have brought me 
£300 n less than a month." The volume ran 
rapidly through seven editions, and was re- 
viewed with almost unmixed eulogy on every 
side. Swinburne's enthusiastic praise in the 
" Fortnightly Review " gave Rossetti especial 
pleasure. 

Some of the poems, as has been mentioned, 
had already appeared in ' ' The Germ, ' ' the 
' ' Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, ' ' and other 
periodicals ; but most of these poems were 
now altered or added to, and many others were 
published for the first time. Among these was 
the lyric " Love's Nocturne," which Rossetti 
had probably offered in early days to Thack- 
eray, the original editor of the "Cornhill 
Magazine " ; but in that magazine neither 
this nor any other poem by Rossetti ever 
appeared. Akin in subject to " Love's Noc- 
turne ' ' is the beautiful little poem ' * First Love 
Remembered," which also appeared now for 
the first time. The arrangement of rhymes in 
it, which is that of Tennyson 's ' ' In Memoriam, ' ' 
is very unusual with this metre. The first and 
fourth lines rhyme, and the second and third, 
as in Tennyson's poem ; but, unlike his lines 
of equal length, the first and the third here 
contain four feet, the second and the fourth 
only three. 

116 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 



FIRST LOVE REMEMBERED 

Peace in her chamber, wheresoe'er 

It be, a holy place : 

The thought still brings my soul such grace 
As morning meadows wear. 

Whether it still be small and light, 
A maid's who dreams alone, 
As from her orchard-gate the moon 

Its ceiling showed at night : 

Or whether, in a shadow dense 

As nuptial hymns invoke, 

Innocent maidenhood awoke 
To married innocence. 

There still the thanks unheard await 
The unconscious gift bequeathed : 
For there my soul this hour has breathed 

An air inviolate. 

" Love's Nocturne " is a far more difficult 
poem : it deals with visions of the night, with 
the shapes one would fain see in dreams, and 
those which more often take their place ; in 
the rush and confusion of its words and images, 
it seems to catch at times the very spirit of 
Dreamland itself. 

The speaker longs to guide his lady's visions : 

Ah ! that from all dreams I might 
Choose one dream and guide its flight ! 

I know well 
What her sleep should tell to-night. 

117 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

But that none can do : he dwells on the shapes 
that fill her dreams and his own, and in verses 
that are in themselves dreamlike in their misty- 
beauty : while she sleeps 

Poets' fancies all are there : 

There the elf-girls flood with wings 

Valleys full of plaintive airs ; 

There breathe perfumes ; there in rings 
Whirl the foam-bewildered springs ; 

Siren there 
Winds her dizzy hair and sings. 

What can give better the mysterious sense of 
disappointment in a dream than this verse ? 

Reft of her, my dreams are all 

Clammy trance that fears the sky : 
Changing footpaths shift and fall ; 

From polluted coverts nigh, 

Miserable phantoms sigh ; 

Quakes the pall, 

And the funeral goes by. 

The poem needs study in order to grasp its full 
meaning ; it contains one specially poor rhyme, 
that of " teeth " to " breathe.' ' 

The " Sonnet-Sequence," which appeared in 
the later editions of Rossetti's poems under 
the title "The House of Life," was only 
partially contained in the volume of 1870. 
There it was headed " Sonnets and Songs, 
towards a Work to be called ' The House of 
Life ' " : this, in its later form, was confined 
118 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

to sonnets. Concerning the name Mr. W. M. 
Rossetti says : " I am not aware that any 
question has been raised as to the meaning of 
the title ' The House of Life ' ; nor did I ever 
hear any explanation of it from my brother. 
He was fond of anything related to astrology or 
horoscopy — not indeed that he ever paid the 
least detailed or practical attention to these 
obsolete speculations ; and I understand him 
to use the term ' The House of Life ' as a 
zodiacal adept uses the term ' the house of Leo.' 
As the sun is said to be ( in the house of Leo,' 
so (as I construe it) Rossetti indicates ' Love, 
Change, and Fate ' as being ' in the House of 
Life ' ; or, in other words, a Human Life is 
ruled and pervaded by the triple influence of 
Love, Change, and Fate." In answer to the 
charge of obscurity, which has been sometimes 
brought against these sonnets, Mr. W. M. 
Rossetti writes : " The sonnets are mostly of 
the kind which we call ' occasional ' ; some 
incident happened, or some emotion was domi- 
nant, and the author wrote a sonnet regarding 
it. When a good number had been written, 
they came to form, if considered collectively, 
a sort of record of his feelings and experiences, 
his reading of the problems of life — an inscribed 
tablet of his mind : then, but not before then, 
he began marshalling them together, and entitled 
them ' The House of Life.' " 

The whole idea and arrangement of these 
sonnets renders quotation difficult : one can 
but pick out here and there those which illus- 

119 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

trate a special thought, or which seem to answer 
directly one to another. Such an answer seems 
to lie in the sonnet numbered XXI in "The 
House of Life " as it appears in the complete 
edition, and called " Love Sweetness," to 
"Lovesight," No. IV. 

LOVESIGHT 

When do I see thee most, beloved one ? 

When in the light the spirits of mine eyes 

Before thy face, their altar, solemnize 
The worship of that Love through thee made known ? 
Or when, in the dusk hours, (we two alone,) 

Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies 

Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies, 
And my soul only sees thy soul its own ? 

love, my love ! if I no more should see 
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee, 

Nor image of thine eyes in any spring, — 
How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope 
The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope, 

The wind of Death's imperishable wing ? 

LOVE-SWEETNESS 

Sweet dimness of her loosened hair's downfall 

About thy face ; her sweet hands round thy head 
In gracious fostering union garlanded ; 

Her tremulous smiles ; her glances' sweet recall 

Of love ; her murmuring sighs memorial ; 

Her mouth's culled sweetness by thy kisses shed 
On cheeks and neck and eyelids, and so led 

Back to her mouth which answers there for all : — 

120 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

What sweeter than these things, except the thing 
In lacking which all these would lose their sweet : — 
The confident heart's still fervour : the swift beat 
And soft subsidence of the spirit's wing, 
Then when it feels, in cloud-girt wayfaring, 
The breath of kindred plumes against its feet ? 

Besides their own power and beauty, these 
sonnets have the added interest that they 
enable one to trace through their lines Rossetti's 
thoughts and feelings toward the greatest 
attributes and events of life. His voice speaks 
again in "The Monochord " (LXXIX in "The 
House of Life ") of the doubts and terrors both 
of reality and imagination, through which lay 
"the road I came"; and, like a trumpet- 
blast of warning to those who come after him, 
sound backward out of the darkness the familiar 
words of " Lost Days " (LXXXVI). 

THE MONOCHORD 

Is it this sky's vast vault or ocean's sound 
That is Life's self and draws my life from me, 
And by instinct ineffable decree 

Holds my breath quailing on the bitter bound ? 

Nay, is it Life or Death, thus thunder crown 'd, 
That 'mid the tide of all emergency 
Now notes my separate wave, and to what sea 

Its difficult eddies labour in the ground ? 

Oh ! what is this that knows the road I came, 
The flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame, 
The lifted shifted steeps and all the way ? — 

121 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

That draws round me at last this wind-warm space, 
And in regenerate rapture turns my face 
Upon the devious coverts of dismay ? 

LOST DAYS 

The lost days of my life until to-day, 

What were they, could I see them on the street 
Lie as they fell ? Would they be ears of wheat 

Sown once for food but trodden into clay ? 

Or golden coins squandered and still to pay ? 
Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet ? 
Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat 

The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway ?- 

I do not see them here ; but after death 
God knows I know the faces I shall see, 

Each one a murdered self, with low last breath. 
" I am thyself, — what hast thou done to me ? " 

" And I — and I — thyself," (lo ! each one saith,) 
" And thou thyself to all eternity ! " 

Of this " Sonnet-Sequence " as a whole Mr. 
W. M. Rossetti writes : " There is, I fancy, a 
prevailing impression that the tone of ' The 
House of Life ' is one of constant and little- 
mitigated gloom." I would venture to say 
that, if this is the case, such an impression is 
due to the fact that those sonnets which deal 
with the sadder side of life and its emotions strike 
deeper than the corresponding height attained 
in those dealing with joy and its attributes. 

Take, for example, the two sonnets " Lost 
on Both Sides " (XCI) and "A Superscription " 
(XCVII), and compare the sheer depth of suffer- 
ing which each reveals with the rapture of joy 

122 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

shown in the two already quoted, " Lovesight " 
and " Love-Sweetness." 

LOST ON BOTH SIDES 

As when two men have loved a woman well, 

Each hating each, through Love's and Death's 
deceit ; 

Since not for either this stark marriage-sheet 
And the long pauses of this wedding-bell ; 
Yet o'er her grave the night and day dispel 

At last their feud forlorn, with cold and heat ; 

Nor other than dear friends to death may fleet 
The two lives left that most of her can tell : — 

So separate hopes, which in a soul had wooed 

The one same Peace, strove with each other long, 
And Peace before their faces perished since : 
So through that soul, in restless brotherhood, 
They roam together now, and wind among 
Its by-streets, knocking at the dusty inns. 

A SUPERSCRIPTION 

Look in my face ; my name is Might-have-been ; 

I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell ; 

Unto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell 
Cast up thy Life's foam-fretted feet between ; 
Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen 

Which had Life's form and Love's, but by my spell 

Is now a shaken shadow intolerable, 
Of ultimate things unuttered the frail screen. 

Mark me, how still I am ! But should there dart 
One moment through thy soul the soft surprise 
Of that winged Peace which lulls the breath of 
sighs, — 

123 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Then shalt thou see me smile, and turn apart 
Thy visage to mine ambush at thy heart 
Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes. 

Perhaps the most characteristic sign of the 
intensity of this minor note throughout "The 
House of Life " is in each reference to Hope, 
so clearly the Hope of Mr. Watts' picture, with 
all but the last string of the lute snapped. Take 
the first four lines from "The One Hope " (CI) 
in the later edition of the poems ; sonnet L in 
that of 1870, from which these lines — slightly 
altered in the later edition — are quoted : 

When all desire at last and all regret 

Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain, 
What shall assuage the unf orgotten pain 

And teach the unforgetful to forget ? 

Or take again the wail of the last line in " Hope 
Overtaken," which did not appear till the later 
volume : 

Alas, cling round me, for the day is done ! 

But, whatever its limitations, " The House of 
Life ' ' makes noble reading for those who have 
eyes to see the mind of which it is an index : 
the connexion between the various sonnets is 
not always obvious, but those who care for 
Rossetti and his work can trace in them every 
shade of his mind and thought, dealing alike 
with things bodily, mental, and spiritual. 



124 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 



IT was in 1868 that the shadow, never again 
to be lifted, began to darken Rossetti 's life. 
In August of that year he wrote to Ailing- 
ham, ' ■ I 've been very seedy, and still am rather 
so, but doctors have been doing me some good." 
According to his brother, even before this date 
he had begun to be threatened with insomnia, 
the curse of so many a man of his type. For the 
relief of this evil, intolerable to one of his 
restless energy, he had been advised by a friend 
to use the newly discovered drug chloral, the 
properties, and specially the after-effects of 
which, were not at the time fully understood. 
" My brother," says Mr. W. M. Rossetti, " was 
one of the men least fitted to try any such 
experiment with impunity. He began, I under- 
stand, with nightly doses of chloral of ten grains. 
In course of time it got to one hundred and 
eighty grains ! " All know and deplore the 
fact that the ruin of his brilliant career, the 
wreck of his life, and his death at the age of 54, 
were the result of his gradual subjection to the 
poisonous drug. 

But by one of those ironical strokes with 
which Fate seems often to check the promise of 
her greatest sons, soon after Rossetti had learned 
the use of the dangerous narcotic, there occurred 
the one incident in his life which did most to 
aggravate his tendency to insomnia, and at the 
same time to render its horrors most unbearable. 

"5 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Hitherto, with little exception, the world had 
honoured him. Except some general criticism 
of the Pre-Raphaelites, which he had shared 
with the rest of the Brotherhood, little had 
been said of his work which he could take amiss. 
On the publication of the " Poems " in 1870 
the same treatment seemed to follow him, and 
the book met with an enthusiastic and well- 
merited welcome. But suddenly, from a sky- 
apparently clear, fell a bolt whose power for 
evil was far greater than anyone could have 
foreseen. Rossetti was enjoying to the full the 
eager and appreciative praises which were 
accorded on all sides to the poems published 
under such tragic circumstances, when the 
check came, and the ugly slur was cast upon 
him which — unjust though it undoubtedly was 
— proved too much for his highly strung and 
sensitive nature. 

There can be little doubt that his increased 
sufferings from insomnia, and consequently 
increased use of the fatal chloral, were largely 
due to the publication in the October number 
of the " Contemporary Review " for 1871, of 
the article styled "The Fleshly School of 
Poetry." It was signed "Thomas Maitland," 
but was the work of Robert Buchanan published 
under a pseudonym, which was unusual in 
the " Contemporary." It is not possible to 
discuss here at any length either the article 
itself, the correspondence to which it led, or 
Rossetti's answer, "The Stealthy School of 
Criticism," which appeared soon afterwards in 
126 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

the " Athenaeum." But the drift of the article 
and its effect on Rossetti are soon stated. It 
opens by comparing the literary figures of the 
day to the characters in ' ' Hamlet, ' ' and deplores 
the fact that certain " walking-on gentlemen," 
to wit Osric, Rosencranz and Guildenstern, for 
whose parts the author casts respectively 
Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris, are allowed to 
make themselves heard above the principal 
characters. ' ' Hamlet, ' ' according to the writer 
of the article, is played by Tennyson and 
Browning on alternate nights, Horatio by 
Matthew Arnold, Voltimand by Bailey, A 
Gentleman by Robert Lytton, and Cornelius by 
Buchanan (!). The article is vigorous and 
ingenious, but the judgments and pronounce- 
ments are so extraordinary that one cannot 
help wondering at even so sensitive a man as 
Rossetti feeling deeply the utterances of such 
a critic. Morris is set aside as " glibly imita- 
tive," Swinburne as " transcendently super- 
ficial." The critic had apparently read both 
"Sister Helen" and "The Last Confession," 
and yet said, " Mr. Rossetti is never dramatic." 
He spoke of the " false and shallow mysticism 
of 'Eden Bower'"; the "affected rubbish" 
about " Eden Bower " and " Sister Helen " ; the 
" sad nonsense " or "if not . . . very mere- 
tricious affectation ' ' of much of the work ; and 
even sank to the simplest form of adverse 
criticism, that of calling the poems "trash." 
Although he wrote anonymously, he introduced 
himself into the article : " Jenny," he wrote, 

127 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

" . . .is a production which bears signs of 
having been suggested by Mr. Buchanan's 
quasi-lyrical poems, which it copies in the style 
and title, and particularly by ' Artist and 
Model.' " 

This point especially irritated Rossetti, whose 
answer in the " Athenaeum " on December 16, 
1 87 1, was throughout the utterance of a very 
angry man : ' ' There is another little charge, 
however," he says near the end of his article, 
" which this minstrel in mufti brings against 
'Jenny,' namely, one of plagiarism from that 
very poetic self of his which the tutelary prose 
does but enshroud for the moment. This 
question can, fortunately, be settled with ease 
by others who have read my critic's poems ; 
and thus I need the less regret that, not happen- 
ing myself to be in that position, I must be 
content to rank with those who cannot pretend 
to an opinion on the subject." He alludes 
to the author of the " Contemporary " article 
as "Mr. Robert-Thomas" — an ironical com- 
bination of the real and assumed Christian 
names — and discusses what he calls " the 
Siamese aspect of the entertainment provided 
by the ' Review,' " doubtless an allusion to the 
Siamese Twins so famous in his day ! 

On one point the article was undoubtedly 
just, and that was its criticism on the careless 
and faulty rhyming of Rossetti and his school ; 
but the review was unsympathetic from start 
to finish, besides containing the special attack 
which made it notorious. 
128 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

The accusation brought against the author of 
the " Poems " was that of writing from a 
moral standpoint which could only be described 
as corrupt. Swinburne and Morris were included 
in the charge of having bound themselves by 
" a solemn league and covenant to extol flesh- 
liness as the distinct and supreme end of poetic 
and pictorial art ; to aver that poetic expression 
is greater than poetic thought, and by inference 
that the body is greater than the soul, and sound 
superior to sense." That Rossetti was a 
painter as well as a poet, and so saw the world 
with the true artist's unsparing fidelity to 
nature, was never taken into account ; in fact 
the creator of " Ecce Ancilla Domini," " Beata 
Beatrix," and " Dante's Dream" was put 
down as " an artist who conceives unpleasantly 
and draws ill." " The fleshly school of verse- 
writers " — so the article goes on — " are, so to 
speak, public offenders, because they are dili- 
gently spreading the seeds of disease broadcast 
wherever they are read and understood." In 
the light of their after achievements it is odd 
to hear Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti summed 
up as " the fantastic figures of the fleshly school, 
with their droll mediaeval garments, their funny 
archaic speech, and the fatal marks of literary 
consumption in every pale and delicate visage." 

To those who have drunk deep draughts of 
spiritual refreshment from passages in ' * The 
Blessed Damozel," " Ave," or " My Sister's 
Sleep " ; who have been carried back to the 
simple, mediaeval world of passion and action 
i 129 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

in the ballads of " Staff and Scrip " and " Eden 
Bower," or "Sister Helen" with its faithful 
reproduction of the spirit of early tragedy ; or 
who have gathered for themselves wise sayings, 
helpful phrases, and gleams of insight into 
" that which is invisible " in such sonnets as 
" The Choice," " Lost Days," or " The Super- 
scription," the accusation brought against 
Rossetti must always stand as the strongest 
instance known in literary history of " Honi 
soit qui mal y pense." Professor Saintsbury, 
in his recent volume on " The History of English 
Prosody," gathers up and dismisses the charge 
in one masterly sentence of his characteristically 
vigorous English. This is no place for full 
discussion on either side : our business here is 
only to mark the sad fact that from the time his 
reputation received this slur — however unjust 
it may have been — Rossetti was an altered 
man. It is easy to say that he took the whole 
matter too seriously ; that may be so, though 
as a fact he did, in the beginning, show some 
amusement at a controversy on the unusual 
fact of a " nom-de-plume " being used by a 
contributor to the ' ' Contemporary Review." 
But the article was enlarged and reproduced in 
pamphlet form, and then it could hardly be 
taken as anything but serious. A man of 
another temperament, and one who had been 
inured earlier to adverse criticism, might have 
taken the matter differently ; but every man 
is himself, and must suffer according to his 
own nature. Rossetti could not have produced 
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ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

the work he did had he not been capable of 
shades of feeling far finer than those of ordinary- 
men ; and therefore, in this case, his suffering 
was proportionately bitter. Nor must it be 
forgotten that from only one grandparent — 
his mother's mother — could he have hoped to 
inherit any of that commodity so useful in times 
of intolerable strain — British pluck. 

The fact remains : the weapon with which 
the wound had been dealt was poisoned, and in 
Rossetti's case the poison proved fatal. 

His brother says: "He allowed a sense of 
unfair treatment, and a suspicion that the slur 
cast upon himself and his writings might be 
widely accepted as true, to eat into his very 
vitals, gravely altering his tone of mind and 
character, his attitude towards the world, and 
his habits of life." And he goes on to speak 
of the increased sleeplessness and the reckless 
use of the chloral, and of the intense mental 
suffering under the accusation ; and he adds, 
" all three had their share in making my 
brother a changed man from 1872 onwards." 

In justice to Buchanan, and in proof also 
that he lived to recognize his mistake, we give 
here his words of a later date to Mr. Hall Caine : 
" I make full admission of Rossetti's claims to 
the purest kind of literary renown, and if I were 
to criticize his poems now, I should write very 
differently." The romance, " God and the 
Man," had been published by Buchanan in 1881, 
and dedicated to Rossetti in lines entitled, " To 
an old Enemy." 

131 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

" I would have snatch' d a bay-leaf from thy brow, 
Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head ; 
In peace and charity I bring thee now 
A lily-flower instead. 

Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song, 
Sweet as thy spirit, may this offering be ; 

Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong, 
And take the gift from me ! " 

Rossetti was pleased at the dedication, and 
all that it implied : after his death Buchanan 
added to it the following verses : 

TO DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 

Calmly thy royal robe of death around thee, 

Thou sleepest, and weeping brethren round thee 
stand — 

Gently they placed — ere yet God's angel crown 'd thee, 
My lily in thy hand ! 

I never knew thee living, O my brother ! 

But on thy breast my lily of love now lies ; 
And by that token, we shall know each other, 

When God's voice saith, " Arise ! " 

Beautiful and appropriate as the lines are, they 
make but one more of the many instances where 
lilies to grace the dead have proved but a poor 
compensation for unjust treatment of the 
living. 

From the end of the year 1872, as his 
brother said, Rossetti was a changed man. He 
became moody and unsociable, and took to 
132 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

keeping always later and later hours, and also 
to following habits which more than ever 
tended to alienate him from his fellow men. 
He would walk out but little, and often only 
after dark, or in his garden, among his strange 
animals. He dropped many of his old friends, 
and grew irritable and suspicious even with 
those for whom he really cared deeply : this 
change in his genial nature was, of course, the 
direct effect of the ever-increasing doses of 
chloral with which he was trying to fight the 
insomnia fiend. 

The ' i Poems ' ' had been fitly dedicated to 
his brother, the friend whose whole-hearted 
sympathy and lifelong interest and companion- 
ship had been more than that of an ordinary 
brother. Partly owing to his failing health, 
and his consequently unsociable ways and odd 
habits, some of his friends became estranged 
from him, but the brother who had shared his 
boyish efforts in producing the family magazine 
" Hotchpotch," and had worked with him in the 
big playroom which Mr. Cottingham had mis- 
named " a garret," gave him in these now 
darkening years the same ungrudging comrade- 
ship and love. Every week they spent at least 
one evening together, and both in his painting 
and his writing his brother was his ever-ready 
critic. The gatherings of friends in the big 
studio continued, although the master had lost 
much of the buoyancy he brought to them 
in earlier days. But he would still read and 
recite in the deep rich voice which to the 

*33 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

end was one of his greatest charms, and to the 
music of which many of those hearers have 
borne testimony. He still had pleasure in 
seeing his friends, though the visits he paid to 
others grew less and less frequent, and his dread 
of new faces increased as time went on. 

For the last years of his life one of his closest 
friends was Mr. Theodore Watts (now Watts 
Dunton), whose care and devotion knew no 
bounds. His friendship with Mr. Hall Caine, 
though carried on for two years previously by 
letter, only extended personally over the last 
two years of his life ; but during those two 
years their intercourse was close and constant, 
and Mr. Hall Caine's " Recollections " bear 
their own testimony to the affectionate nature 
of their relationship to one another. 

XI 

THOUGH failing in health, Rossetti never 
relinquished work, either with brush 
or pen, during the last years of his 
life. The account of his pictures must be read 
elsewhere, and fits in with that of the poems ; 
"The Blessed Damozel " he reproduced more 
than once in oil or crayon ; and a pen-and-ink 
sketch of " Sister Helen " and a tinted wash of 
" Troy Town," both owned by his brother, were 
executed about this time. 

"Troy Town " was one of the few poems 
other than sonnets which he published dealing 
with a classical subject ; it may be that neither 
134 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

his mind nor methods lent themselves readily to 
a classical setting, for the ballad lacks the wild 
beauty and power of " Sister Helen " and the 
mystic charm of "Eden Bower." " Heaven- 
born Helen, Sparta's Queen," never seems quite 
to live before us as does her merciless Scottish 
namesake, or Lilith the snake-witch of Eden. 
The single-lined refrain is effective, but that of 
the couplet ending each verse is hardly so 
musical as most of the ballad choruses, and 
strikes the ear at times as almost wooden. The 
story is that of Helen of Troy suing to Venus 
for the love of Paris : she brings an offering 
of a <( carven cup," and entreats the goddess 
by the memory of that judgment of Paris 
given once long ago in her favour. 

" Once an apple stirred the beat 

Of thy heart with the heart's desire : — 
Say, who brought it then to thy feet ? 

(0 Troy's down, 
Tall Troy's on fire !) 

" They that claimed it then were three : 
(0 Troy Town /) 
For thy sake two hearts did he 

Make forlorn of the heart's desire. 
Do for him as he did for thee ! " 
(0 Troy's down, 
Tall Troy's on fire !) 

Venus looked on Helen's gift, 

(0 Troy Town !) 
Looked and smiled with subtle drift, 

135 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Saw the work of her heart's desire : — 
" There thou kneel'st for Love to lift ! " 

(O Troy's down, 
Tall Troy's on fire /) 

In Helen's proud heart the dart of Venus 's 
messenger had already done its work ; and now 

Cupid took another dart, 

(O Troy Town !) 

Fledged it for another heart, 

Winged the shaft with the heart's desire, 

Drew the string and said, " Depart ! " 
(O Troy's down, 
Tall Troy's on fire !) 

Paris turned upon his bed, 

(O Troy Town !) 

Turned upon his bed and said, 

Dead at heart with the heart's desire — 

" Oh, to clasp her golden head ! •' 
(O Troy's down, 
Tall Troy's on fire !) 

The poem is interesting as being the only- 
ballad in which Rossetti attempted to deal with a 
classical subject, but that subject loses some- 
thing of its natural force by what Mr. Knight 
has aptly called its ' ' gothic setting. ' ' 

Akin in subject to " Troy Town" is the 
sonnet " Venus," called in the later editions 
' ' Venus Verticordia ' ' : 



136 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

VENUS 

(FOR A PICTURE) 

She hath the apple in her hand for thee, 
Yet almost in her heart would hold it back ; 
She muses, with her eyes upon the track 

Of that which in thy spirit they can see. 

Haply, " Behold, he is at peace," saith she ; 
" Alas ! the apple for his lips, — the dart 
That follows its brief sweetness to his heart, — 

The wandering of his feet perpetually ! " 

A little space her glance is still and coy, 

But if she give the fruit that works her spell, 

Those eyes shall flame as for her Phrygian boy. 

Then shall her bird's strained throat the woe foretell, 
And her far seas moan as a single shell, 

And her grove glow with love-lit fires of Troy. 

The last line in this sonnet is changed in the 
later editions, considerably for the better ; it 
runs : 

And through her dark grove strike the light of Troy. 

The thought is more tersely expressed, and the 
awkward double "o " sound in " grove " and 
" glow " is lost. 

The Past was always to Rossetti more real 
than the Present : with contemporary events 
he concerned himself but little, and with the 
judgments of others on those events still less. 

In the historical ballads of his later volume, 
which are among his finest works, the Scotland 
of James I's time and the England of Henry I's 

137 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

are finely reproduced ; but only by memory, 
not internal evidence, does one connect the 
year of the publication of the ' ' Poems ' ' with 
that of the Franco-German War. Perhaps the 
only lines in that volume into which can be read 
thoughts connected with the state of Europe 
at the time are those of the sonnet entitled 

ON REFUSAL OF AID BETWEEN NATIONS 

Not that the earth is changing, O my God ! 

Nor that the seasons totter in their walk, — 

Not that the virulent ill of act and talk 
Seethes ever as a winepress ever trod, — 
Not therefore are we certain that the rod 

Weighs in Thine hand to smite Thy world ; though 
now 

Beneath Thine hand so many nations bow, 
So many kings : — not therefore, my God ! — 

But because Man is parcelled out in men 
To-day ; because, for any wrongful blow 
No man not stricken asks, ' ' I would be told 
Why Thou dost thus " ; but his heart whispers then, 
" He is He, I am I." By this we know 
That our earth falls asunder, being old. 

But, appropriate as it was to the state of Euro- 
pean affairs on its publication, it had been 
written, though possibly in a different form, 
more than twenty years before. The " Pre- 
Raphaelite Journal " for Sunday, August 26 
(1849), bears the following entry : " Gabriel 
wrote a sonnet entitled ' For the Things of these 
Days,' ' ' ; and below follows a note by Mr. W. M. 
138 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Rossetti, " Must be the same as ' On the Refusal 
of Aid between Nations.' " 

To the end of his life Rossetti was a worker. 
His pictures never commanded sufficiently high 
prices during his lifetime to render him inde- 
pendent of money-making, though the publica- 
tion of the " Poems " in 1870 had brought his 
name before the world in such a way as to add 
greatly to his artistic reputation. He was urged 
by his friends to develop further his efforts both 
in sonnet and ballad form, with the result that 
in 1 88 1 he published a second volume of poems 
entitled ' ' Ballads and Sonnets ' ' : the longest 
ballad in the book, " The King's Tragedy," has 
been pronounced by many good judges to be 
his finest work. 

It evidently gained his own approval, for 
early in 1881 he wrote : " I am writing a 
ballad on the death of James I of Scots. It is 
already twice the length of ' The White Ship ' 
and has a good slice still to come. It is called 
* The King's Tragedy,' and is a ripper, I can 
tell you ! ' ' 

The ballad reproduces with extraordinary 
power both the historical scenes and figures in 
the Scotland of our Henry VI's day and also 
that wild spirit of mystic superstition so deeply 
rooted in the Celtic mind and so beloved of 
Rossetti himself. That spirit haunts the whole 
poem in the figure of the woman, " gaunt and 
strong," who repeatedly warns King James of 
his doom, according to the legend of the shrouded 
wraith. 

139 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

She stands before him in the moonlight by 
the sea, as he is going north to keep his Christ- 
mas at Perth ; and she cries to him : 

" O King, thou art come at last ; 
But thy wraith has haunted the Scottish Sea 
To my sight for four years past." 

She foretells the accomplishment of his doom 
by the progress in her repeated visions of that 
cere-cloth, or winding-sheet, around his body. 
First his feet alone " clung close in a shroud " ; 
then, at intervals of a year, the sheet had risen 
over knees and breast and throat, until she now 
foresees the end at hand : 

" And when I meet thee again, O King, 
That of death hast such sore drouth, — 
Except thou turn again on this shore, — 
The winding-sheet shall have moved once more 
And covered thine eyes and mouth." 

But the King refuses her warning in lines 
which are among the finest Rossetti ever 
penned, and he goes on his way to meet his 
Fate, 

" to His will resign 'd 
Who has but one same death for a hind 
And one same death for a king." 

Twice again in the poem comes the haunting 
cry, once when the woman is refused admission 
to the King's presence at the feast and cries her 
last warning to the usher beneath the window, 
and once more when she announces the fulfil- 
ment of the doom in words for all to hear. 
140 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

No less vivid than the weird figure of this 
woman, and the superstition of which she is 
the embodiment, are the pictures of James I 
himself and his English bride, Joan of Somerset. 
James stands again before us in all the gallant 
grace bred in the long years of his captivity — 
those years in which the chivalry of England's 
knighthood had been his training and Prince 
Hal and the wise John of Bedford his com- 
panions. Throughout the poem rings an echo 
of his famous utterance, for the fulfilment of 
which he died : " I will make the key keep the 
castle, and the brackenbush keep the cow, 
though I live the life of a dog to bring it about." 

For he had tamed the nobles' lust 
And curbed their power and pride, 

And reached out an arm to right the poor 
Through Scotland far and wide. 

Another true note that sounds throughout the 
ballad is that which tells of the passionate love 
uniting to the end the royal pair, from the day 
when 

At Scone were the happy lovers crowned, 
A heart-wed King and Queen, 

to the eve of his death, when 

the King was loth to stir from her side 
For as on the day when she was his bride, 
Even so he loved her yet. 

The tale of life at the northern court has 
nowhere been better told than in these simple 

141 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

rolling lines ; the grim scenes in Scottish 
history rise one after the other with almost 
unbroken historical accuracy, and yet glowing 
with the genius alike of painter and of poet. 
We see in turn the state of Scotland, being slowly 
reclaimed from lawless misery ; the angry 
and rebellious barons, divided by their fierce 
and often hereditary feuds ; and Catherine 
Douglas, who tells the tale, and who earned her 
proud title of Kate Barlass by her gallant attempt 
to stay the King's murderers with her arm thrust 
through the stanchions of the vanished bolts : 

" 'Twas Catherine Douglas sprang to the door, 
But I fell back Kate Barlass." 

In the weird woman's last despairing cry 
beneath the chamber window occurs one of the 
few historical inaccuracies of the poem ; the 
King's death took place in the Monastery of 
the Black Friars, and not the Charterhouse. It 
is well to notice this small point, especially as 
the value of such a ballad for young students, 
in giving life to the dead bones of history, can 
hardly be over-estimated. The spirit of Scotch 
tragedy is faithfully reproduced throughout the 
poem, the characters are true to life, the details 
move one as those of to-day, and stanzas are 
cleverly inserted from James's own poem, 
"The King's Quair." Toward the end the 
verses seem to glow with the smouldering fire 
of the hiddenp lot ; then the fire bursts forth, and 
the " King's Tragedy " is seen in all its horror : 
Catherine Douglas's act of futile grandeur is 
142 



ROSSETTI fif HIS POETRY 

accomplished, she has fallen back Kate Barlass, 
and in the Pit of Fortune's Wheel the 

King lay slain 
With sixteen wounds in his breast. 

Then the ballad sinks to a minor key ; it tells 
of the pursuit and capture of the traitors one 
by one, and of the awful fate meted out to them 
by command of the widowed Queen ; and it 
ends with the picture, as sad as any ever seen 
in history or fiction, that of the broken-hearted 
Joan of Scotland in her frenzied exultation 
over her revenge : 

And then she said, — " My King, they are dead 1 " 

And she knelt on the chapel-floor, 
And whispered low with a strange proud smile, — 

" James, James, they suffered more ! " 

The ballad of "The White Ship " does not 
rise to the same heights of inspired song as does 
"The King's Tragedy," but it gives a vivid 
reproduction of a famous episode in English 
history, and there is something akin to inspira- 
tion in the choice of such a metre for such a 
subject. As all light died out in the life of 
Henry I when his son was drowned, so all 
spirit seems quenched in the dull monotony, 
that becomes at times almost a drone, of the 
two-lined verses in which the ballad runs. 
Nothing could accord better with the dull, sad 
utterances of " poor Berold," " the butcher of 
Rouen " who tells the tale : 

143 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

'Twas so in my youth I heard men say, 
And my old age calls it back to-day. 

We see once more Henry I in his last 
loveless years, and we live again with him 
through the tragic scenes that ended the hopes 
of his life. 

The journey to Normandy is described, with 
its fatal homeward passage ; the request of 
' ' stout Fitz-Stephen," the " pilot famous in 
seafaring," to guide the King's voyage in his 
" famed White Ship," and Henry's bestowal on 
him as passengers of the Prince and his sister. 
The story of the voyage is followed faithfully, 
and the end of the Prince whom * ' nothing 
beseemed like his manner of dying " : 

He was a Prince of lust and pride ; 

He showed no grace till the hour he died. 

God only knows where his soul did wake, 
But I saw him die for his sister's sake. 

Then the scene opens again in the quiet 
moonlight, where the knight and the pilot and 
the poor butcher are all that remain on the sea's 
broad breast out of that gay ship's company. 

Faithful to the story, Fitz-Stephen is made to 
sink of his own free will at the news of the 
Prince's death ; then Godefroy de l'Aigle's 
strength gives out, and Berold is left alone. 

Three hundred souls were all lost but one, 
And I drifted over the sea alone. 
144 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Then he tells of his rescue, his confession to 
the priest, and his journey with him 

To King Henry's court at Winchester. 

All know how none dared tell the news ; 
and the ballad seems to drop out its monotonous 
lines, one after another, in curious accordance 
with that time of waiting : there is a moment's 
relief at the entry before the King 

Of a little boy with golden hair ; 

but he comes only to tell the awful news of the 
Prince's death, and the royal father sinks 
backward "asa man struck dead." 

But this King never smiled again : 

The famous saying is given prominence by 
being printed alone, as a separate verse ; and 
the ballad ends with a repetition of the opening 
stanza : 

By none but we can the tale be told, 
The butcher of Rouen, poor Berold. 

(Lands are swayed by a king on a throne.) 
'Twas a royal train put forth to sea, 
Yet the tale can be told by none but me. 

(The sea hath no king but God alone.) 

It had been at Kelmscott Manor, in 1871, 
his brother tells us, that Rossetti began the 
third long ballad of the volume, " Rose Mary," 
which does not deal with an historical subject. 

K 145 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

The mystic beryl-stone of the East, in which 
none but the pure may read, is the key on which 
the story turns, the story of Rose Mary and her 
sin and sorrow : 

Of her two fights with the Beryl-stone : 
Lost the first, but the second won. 

It is a fine ballad, but must be studied as a 
whole to be fully appreciated, with its rich 
imagination, its Oriental touches, and the 
simple pathos of its story. There are no more 
musical lines in the volume than are found 
here, in the cry of the stricken mother and 
daughter to one another : 

" Hush, sweet, hush ! be calm and behold." 
" I see two floodgates broken and old : 
The grasses wave o'er the ruined weir, 
But the bridge still leads to the breakwater ; 
And — mother, mother, O mother dear ! " 

The mother looked on the daughter still 

As on a hurt thing that's yet to kill. 

Then wildly at length the pent tears came ; 

The love swelled high with the swollen shame, 

And their hearts' tempest burst on them. 

These three ballads formed with ' ' The House 
of Life " the chief part of Rossetti's volume of 
1 88 1, though there are many other poems in 
it t and also in the earlier volume, with which 
it has been impossible to deal, but which should 
never remain unknown to any student of 
literature. 
146 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

Translation was another gift in which Rossetti 
was pre-eminent among English poets : his 
volume, "The Early Italian Poets," published 
in 1 86 1, was, as his brother puts it, " very well 
received — so far as a book of translated poems 
has in this country a chance of welcome and 
encomium — and gave Rossetti a sufficiently 
solid position as a scholar in his own line of 
study, and a poet as well, for it was recognized 
that none save a poet in his own right could 
have made such a transfer of poetry from one 
language into another. ' ' Italian was, of course, 
to him an early known medium for expression, 
but his genius for translating the spirit as well 
as the words of a poem is shown also in other 
tongues. A well-known English classical 
scholar places as high as any translated verse 
in the English language his " Ballad of Dead 
Ladies," from Francois Villon, and "One Girl 
(a combination from Sappho)." 

But the fifty-four years were drawing to a 
close, and Rossetti 's career was nearly over. 
Changes to country air, to Kelmscott Manor 
and the Lakes, were powerless to arrest his 
illness, or the use of the drug which was killing 
him. Perhaps with such a nature as his it 
was best that the end should not be longer 
drawn out. He enjoyed the society of his 
friends to the last, and he had but just been 
visited by Philip Bourke Marston and his father, 
when he was suddenly stricken with paralysis 
of the right side. This was the beginning of 
the end. In January 1882 he was moved down 

i47 



ROSSETTI & HIS POETRY 

to Birchington, a little place on the Kentish 
coast about four miles from Margate, to the 
house of Mr. J. P. Seddon. The loving friend- 
ship and family affection which had enriched 
his life did not fail him at the last : his mother 
was with him and his brother and sister, and 
a faithful band of friends, and in their presence 
he passed away on Easter Day, April 9, 1882, 
at the age of fifty-four. 

So died Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a man hard 
to place among English poets because he was 
an Italian as well as an Englishman, a painter 
as well as a poet. He had the double nature, 
and some have found it hard to forgive him the 
double weaknesses which that nature entailed. 

He lived and wrote in an atmosphere heavy 
with scent and sound and beauty, essentially 
un-English ; but for that very reason his work 
is of special value, and he holds a unique position 
among English poets. 

For though the atmosphere was heavy, the 
man who dwelt within it was a genius ; and 
even as that genius echoed in the memory of 
his friends on that April morning round the 
Kentish grave, so it must echo always to us 
in the varied beauties of " The House of Life," 
the wild music of "Sister Helen," or the 
matchless wonder of " The Blessed Damozel." 



148 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

TEXT 

" The Germ " (reprint). 

" Poems : by Dante Gabriel Rossetti." (Messrs. 

F. S. Ellis, 33 King Street.) 
" Ballads and Sonnets : by Dante Gabriel Rossetti." 

2 vols. (Messrs. Ellis and Elvey.) 
" Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," edited 

with preface and notes by William M. Rossetti. 

2 vols. (Messrs. Ellis and Elvey.) 
" Dante Gabriel Rossetti 's Poems and Translations." 

(The World's Classics, Oxford University Press.) 

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM 

" Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters," edited by 

William Michael Rossetti. 
" Letters and Memoir of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," by 

William Michael Rossetti. 
" Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As Designer and Writer. 

Notes by William Michael Rossetti. Including a 

Prose Paraphrase of the House of Life." 
" Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1854 -1870, to 

William Allingham." Edited by George Birkbeck 

Hill. 
" Dante Gabriel Rossetti : A Record and a Study." 

By William Sharp. 
" Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti." By Hall 

Caine. 
" Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti." By Joseph Knight. 
" Rossetti." By Arthur C. Benson. (English Men 

of Letters.) 
11 Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and His 

149 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Circle.*' By Henry T. Dunn. Edited and anno- 
tated by Gale Pedrick. With a Prefatory Note by 
William Michael Rossetti. 

Dictionary of National Biography, " Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti." Richard Garnett. 

Encyclopaedia Britannica. " Dante Gabriel Rossetti." 
By Theodore Watts-Dunton. 






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